> if your drug fails to show statistically significant efficacy in testing that means you don’t get approval.
He doesn't make that point, but that one is also rather silly. If all of our evidence suggests mask effectiveness among elementary school students (some by mechanism, some by simulation, and some by evaluating mask policies on other groups), including the study he pointed to, the correct decision is to require masks for elementary school students. The harms are negligible, and the benefits for reducing community spread are large. The risk for approving an ineffective drug is far larger.
Elsewhere, you made the point that we don't know if masks should be required for toddlers. That I agree with, but that isn't a point that Zweig has made.
> It’s also important to underline that just because the Georgia study did not find a statistically significant benefit doesn’t mean that a larger, more statistically powerful study might not find one, said Hoeg, the epidemiologist. But since this study had 90,000 students, then the question becomes: If you need 500,000 or 1 million people to find a benefit, how marginal is that benefit?
You seem to be misreading his conclusion. He’s not saying “masking children doesn’t work.” His point is that the practice carries significant potential downsides for children, and the best real-world study we have failed to provide affirmative support that those are outweighed by statistically significant reductions in COVID transmission.
It’s the same thing the FDA does—if your drug fails to show statistically significant efficacy in testing that means you don’t get approval.