Researchers: No evidence to support mask mandates

FPI / February 12, 2023

Wearing a mask was so effective that it should be mandated even for 2-year-olds. That was the CDC’s marching order and many Covid tyrants throughout the U.S. followed in lock step.

The impact can still be seen in wide swaths of humanity after the muzzling of tens of millions of Americans.

A new scientific review has confirmed what independent media outlets have reported since the early days of mask mania, for which such outlets were accused of and penalized for spreading “misinformation” — that there was never any evidence mask mandates make a difference in the spread of Covid.

The review, published on Jan. 30 by the Cochrane Library, analyzed 18 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that measured the effectiveness against Covid of wearing surgical masks or N95 respirators in public and found “little or no difference” in the number of infections.

The review goes “to the heart of the case for mask mandates, a policy that generated much resentment and acrimony during the pandemic. They also show that the CDC, which has repeatedly exaggerated the evidence in favor of masks, cannot be trusted as a source of public health information,” Jacob Sullum wrote for Reason.com on Feb. 8.

In September 2020, then‒CDC Director Robert Redfield insisted masks were "the most important, powerful public health tool we have."

Redfield's successor, Rochelle Walensky, kept the mask propaganda machine rolling in November 2021: "The evidence is clear," wearing a mask "reduc[es] your chance of infection by more than 80 percent." Three months later, the CDC claimed a study it published had shown that "wearing a mask lowered the odds of testing positive" by as much as 83 percent.

The demigod of all Covid demagogues, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said in Dec. 2021: “One of the things that’s very clear is that if you have to be in an indoor congregate setting in which you’re unsure of what the vaccination status is of the people around you, wear a mask.”

It has long been known that vaccination status has nothing to do with Covid transmission.

Sullum noted that the CDC leaders’ statements “were based on two sources of evidence with widely recognized drawbacks: laboratory experiments in stylized conditions and observational studies that do not fully account for variables that affect virus transmission. RCTs are designed to avoid those problems by comparing disease rates among subjects randomly assigned to wear masks in real-life situations with disease rates in a control group.”

If masks indeed were as effective as the CDC claimed, “you would expect to see evidence of that in RCTs. But the Cochrane review found essentially no relationship between mask wearing and disease rates, whether measured by reported symptoms or by laboratory tests,” Sullum wrote.

When it comes to symptoms consistent with Covid-19 or influenza, the review’s authors stated that "wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference." They reached the same conclusion regarding laboratory-confirmed cases.

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