America Masks Make No Diff erence


Face coverings do nothing to reduce COVID, says definitive scientific review.


W BY JOHN TIERNEY


e now have the most authoritative estimate of the value provided by wearing masks during the pandemic: approximately zero.


The most rigorous and extensive review of the scientifi c


literature concludes that neither surgical masks nor N95 masks make a diff erence in reducing the spread of COVID- 19 and other respiratory illnesses. This verdict ought to be the death knell for mask man-


dates, but that would require the Centers for Disease Con- trol and Prevention (CDC) and the rest of the public health establishment to forsake “the science” — and unfortunately, these leaders and their acolytes in the media seem as deter- mined as ever to ignore actual science. Before the pandemic, clinical trials repeatedly showed


little or no benefi t from wearing masks in preventing the spread of respiratory illnesses like fl u and colds. That was why, in their pre-2020 plans for dealing with a


viral pandemic, the World Health Organization, the CDC, and other national public health agencies did not recom- mend masking the public. But once COVID-19 arrived, magical thinking prevailed.


Offi cials ignored the previous fi ndings and plans, instead touting crude and easily debunked studies purporting to show that masks worked. The gold standard for medical evidence is the random-


ized clinical trial, and the gold standard for analyzing this evidence is Cochrane (formerly the Cochrane Collabora- tion), the world’s largest and most respected organization for evaluating health interventions. Medical journals have hailed it as “the best single


resource for methodologic research” and for being “recog- nized worldwide as the highest standard in evidence-based healthcare.” It has published a new Cochrane review of the literature


Fauci Tried to Disprove China Lab Leak Theory F


ormer white house covid-19 czar Dr. Anthony Fauci repeat-


edly dismissed theories that COVID- 19 began with a lab leak in Wuhan, China — and commissioned a paper to “disprove” the theory, according to Republicans on the House select sub- committee investigating the origin of


12 NEWSMAX | APRIL 2023


the pandemic. One of the paper’s co-authors, Dr.


Kristian Andersen, said Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins were two of several big scientifi c names who “prompted” him to write a study to debunk the lab leak, according to


emails submitted with the article to Nature Medicine on Feb. 12, 2020. Fauci, who headed President Don-


ald Trump’s White House Corona- virus Task Force, and 12 other sci- entists had been informed during a Feb. 1, 2020, conference call that the COVID-19 virus may have leaked


JEFFREY GREENBERG/UCG/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES


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