on masks, including trials during the COVID-19 pandemic in hospitals and community settings. The trials compared outcomes of wearing surgical masks
versus wearing no masks, and also wearing surgical masks versus N95 masks. The review, conducted by a dozen researchers from six countries, concludes that wearing any kind of face cover- ing “probably makes little or no difference” in reducing the spread of respiratory illness. It may seem intuitive that masks must do something. But
even if they do trap droplets from coughs or sneezes (the reason surgeons wear masks), they still allow tiny viruses to spread by aerosol even when worn correctly — and it’s unrealistic to expect most people to do so. While a mask may keep out some pathogens, its inner surface can also trap concentrations of pathogens that are then breathed back into the lungs. Oxford University’s Tom Jefferson, lead author of the Cochrane review, summed up the real science on masks: “There is just no evidence that they make any difference. Full stop.” This lack of evidence would be enough to keep any
new drug or medical treatment from being approved — much less one whose purported benefits had not even been weighed against the harmful side effects. There’s no doubt, from dozens of peer-reviewed studies,
that masks cause social, psychological, and medical prob- lems, including a constellation of maladies called mask- induced exhaustion syndrome. Yet public health officials, in violation of the first-do-
no-harm principle, continue recommending or mandating masks without good evidence of their effectiveness or any pretense of cost-benefit analysis. Masks are still required in many hospitals and other institutions. The CDC’s director, Rochelle Walensky, remains determined to ignore the best research on masks, as she made clear in a congressional hearing last month. It was a statement remarkable for its chutzpah as well
as its scientific incoherence. One of the worst mistakes of the CDC and other lavishly funded federal agencies was the failure to conduct randomized clinical trials to determine whether their policies were effective.
from the lab. The scientists wrote a Feb. 4,
2020, paper, titled The Proximal Ori- gin of SARS-CoV-2. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory con- struct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the scientists wrote, according to the House panel. Evidence suggests that Dr. Jeremy
Facing Up to Facts I
275 250 225 200 175 150 125 100 75 50 25 0
n his book Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates, data analyst Ian Miller devotes an entire chapter
to graphs exposing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s statistical malfeasance. He also prepared a graph, a visual confirmation — from nationwide data, not clinical trials — of the conclusions in the Cochrane review. The graph tracks the first two years of the pandemic, when mask mandates were imposed and lifted at various times in 39 states.
MASK MANDATE STATES VS. NO MANDATE
No Mandate Mandate
Apr ’20 Jul ’20
Oct ’20
Jan ’21
Apr ’21
Jul ’21
Oct ’21
Jan ’22 The black line on the graph shows the weekly rate of
COVID-19 cases in states with mask mandates that week, while the orange line shows the rate in states without mandates. The trajectories are virtually identical, and if you add up
all those numbers, the cumulative rates of COVID-19 cases are virtually identical too. So are the cumulative rates of COVID-19 mortality (the
mortality rate is actually a little lower in the states without mask mandates). Hundreds of millions of Americans dutifully covered their
faces in the states with mandates, and the result was the same as in the clinical trials analyzed by Cochrane: The masks made no difference. — J.T.
The Cochrane review had to rely on pandemic mask tri-
als conducted in other countries — and now Walensky has the gall to complain that other countries didn’t do enough of the research that U.S. agencies shirked. “Our masking guidance doesn’t really change with time,”
she said, when asked how the new review would affect the agency’s policies. Can anything persuade the maskaholics in the public
health establishment and the public to give up their obses- sion?
John Tierney is a contributing editor to City Journal.
Farrar, chief scientist of the World Health Organization (WHO), was involved with the paper, the commit- tee added. Fauci cited the paper when he addressed the media on April 17, 2020:
“There was a study recently that
we can make available to you where a group of highly qualified evolution-
ary virologists looked at the sequenc- es . . . in bats as they evolve, and the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consis- tent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human,” Fauci said. Both the FBI and the U.S. Energy Department said in March that the COVID-19 pandemic probably was the result of a laboratory leak in China.
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