Hell, I kinda wish we'd kept it up everywhere. Not having anyone in my house get so much as the flu for about 2.5 years was kinda awesome. I think we had a single mild cold go through our house, that entire time.

How do they help? There is no evidence that they reduce infection of respiratory viruses.

> The pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks. There were no clear differences between the use of medical/surgical masks compared with N95/P2 respirators in healthcare workers when used in routine care to reduce respiratory viral infection.

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...

And googling the key line there reveals a full page of Google results with articles explaining how both the initial assumptions and methodology was flawed. It was surprising even to me how easy it was to find rebuttals.

https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/yes-masks-reduce-risk-spre...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/opinion/masks-work-cochra...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/16/cochrane-...

At least, unlike the other person in this thread, you didn't do the gaslighty thing of acting like 'we all know' masks don't work.

As per your first link, rate of infection with masks was 90% the rate of infection without masks. I mean, technically it "works" even if reduces the rates of infection by 0.0000001%. But most people are not going to see much benefit in masking if it only reduces the rate marginally.

The intensity of the push for masking was not at all matched by the effectiveness of masking. From most people's perspectives, if the rate of infection with masking is 90% the rate with no masking then masking doesn't work in layperson's terms.

Speaking as someone who actually has an advanced degree in science and understands how to read papers and interpret medical evidence (unlike Tufecki, who has literally zero scientific training or understanding of statistics) has read ~every paper on masks ever published, the "rebuttals" there are nonsense.

The Cochrane review was not incorrect; it was not retracted. The "apology from Cochrane" was not about the paper itself, and they didn't say that the conclusions were wrong. The NY Times and the Washington Post and Gavi are just wrong, and they're lying. Full stop. By literally the same standards of evidence they are using ("the lower bound of the confidence interval crosses 1.0, so we can't exclude the possibility of benefit"), Ivermectin and HCQ "work" against Covid. So you either accept both claims, or you reject both.

We have two political teams, each advancing separate-but-equal forms of pseudo-sciencey twaddle, and neither side is willing to admit that the actual data doesn't back their opinions:

https://sensiblemed.substack.com/p/the-cochrane-mask-fiasco

Gonna go with "wearing a mask to stop particulate spread" is not separate but equal from taking horse dewormer. (And it's not an exaggeration to characterize it as such when they're literally buying drugs from farm suplly stores and injecting amounts meant for livestock over the course of a few days.)

Similarly, I don't know anyone who has died from wearing a mask.

This is not even to mention the numerous other studies, experiments, and demsonstartsions of all sorts of respiratory protective gear that show effectiveness against particulates smaller even than COVID-19.

Oh, stop. Ivermectin is a human drug. The fact that you're repeating this line shows that you're not commenting in good faith.

Quite literally, the evidence for both is equally good (or bad). Citing mechanistic or laboratory studies is absurd, when we have actual RCTs.

Yeah, okay. Lmk when there's telegram groups of people injecting 10x the human dose of masks and literally dying.

>masks actually do help when everyone wears them.

Could I get a citation for this please? Just about every source I've seen has since admitted that masks did absolutely nothing for the purposes for which they were advised to be used.

When you dig into those studies, they aren't that great either fwiw.