I totally do not get why people have to try to prove to themselves that masks do not work. More than likely they do especially if you have a new good well fitting mask changed frequently and you use and change it properly. There is also the question who it helps more, you or the people around you.
A huge problem during the pandemic was mask availability, and people using them properly even if they had a supply to do that which mostly no one did. So result of mask use is a good question but it may say nothing about how well masks used properly work.
I totally do not get why people have to try to prove to themselves that masks do not work.
I see it as a failure of politics. It’s been a while now, but IIRC in the US as well people were told that they shouldn’t wear N95, just like we in Europe were told not to wear FFP2. That they are hard to use and best left to professionals. That having a beard makes them useless. Now there was a decent idea behind it, stocks were low and uncertain, and healthcare professionals needed respirators first. But then production ramped up, and they were everywhere, and suddenly those masks are great and everyone should wear them.
That kind of political messaging has to produce conflict.
Yes. I just wish they had been honest. Yes they are effective but please minimize use of certain classes of masks and leave for those that really need them until stocks catch up.
The whole messaging sucked. You had to know something to read between the lines. Not a problem for me but I am sure was confusing for others. Then you had those that wanted to make it confusing.
I kind of understand. “Efficiency” is a relative measure. If there’s a shortage of masks, it is not efficient enough to prioritize ordinary people. Later when there is an abundance of masks, they are more efficient than not wearing masks.
In expert discussions everybody understands that. The problem is that when this gets out of experts’ hands the context gets lost and there will be a hundred different messaging problems and we non-experts see chaos.
There is also who wins and who losses and who has access and who does not and why. Not easy questions and not easy for people to hear even if it is sane. Add to that access is often just because and has nothing to do with fairness.
Add to that the medical community has basically burnt any good will they had from the public by crazy pricing and poor access combined with mediocre results. Not saying every medical partipant caused that but they all get lumped together.
Add to that the medical community has basically burnt any good will they had from the public by crazy pricing and poor access combined with mediocre results.
You realize masks are generally sold by manufacturers, and not what would traditionally be referred to as the medical community. Blaming doctors and nurses for masks being expensive or hard to get seems a little ridiculous. “How dare the medical community, represented by…Home Depot…charge so much for N95 masks!”
It is not about masks. It is about crazy prices throughout the industry. Lack of both quality and price transparency. Lack of competition.
And blaming the medical community for that is as silly as blaming them for the toilet paper shortage.
They were honest the first time. Widespread mask use does nothing to curb the spread of respiratory illness. Then a weird religion popped up declaring masks as their headdress, and the CDC joined it
Mask debates were one of those things that taught me internet people mostly have poor reading skills. I only wrote that masks alone cannot explain the decay of covid in mask-wearing Asia. >90% of redditors wrongly labeled me as an antimasker and criticized me… The phone notifications were annoying.
It’s not just poor reading skills, but the hyper partisan tribalism that developed and a near religious obsession with arbitrary things like masks
I am a pro-masker, but I don’t like this article.
This is an article from a historian, i.e. not an expert on medicine. What is argued is that we haven’t disproved that mask works.
The problem is that this doesn’t mean anything. For example, we haven’t disproved UFOs. We haven’t disproved aliens are watching us. We haven’t disproved ivermectin.
Now, we meet people who insist that UFOs exist, aliens watch us, or ivermectin is the cure for covid, and we are skeptical about them.
If you read the article, the author only writes that masks aren’t disproved of their efficiency and that it was wrong to say masks don’t work.
So, a good scientist would understand that there’s only weak evidence for the efficiency of masks raised in this article. The author probably knows that. In that sense, he hasn’t lied.
However, I suspect he also knew that ordinaries would read this article and jump to the conclusion that masks do work.
The worst part about it is that we HAVE disproved mask mandates. After years of them enacted across entire populations, like state wide mandates, we have more than enough examples to show that long term the effect on spread was absolute zero.
Just look at the CDC study this very article links to in order to see how bad the “proof” is on a population level. They cherry pick a specific period of time in a specific place, and compare places with mask mandates to those without. With the timing lined up just right where the places with mandates had just gotten out of a HUGE surge, while the places without were just getting hit with the traveling wave. Pathetic
The point of mask mandates is short term. They are meant to slow the spread, not stop it.
Good article. Cochrane has its place but also has its issues. I like the phrase mentioned in the article “methodological fetishism” to describe their style.
