Do Masks Even Work? Follow the Science

The View from the Middle

 

In early 2020, America’s Doctor, Tony Fauci, said this about masks. “The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out (this) virus, which is small enough to pass through the material.  It might provide some slight benefit in keeping out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you.”  Notice that he used the words “might” and “slight”.  These are not scientific terms.  In fact, they are the opposite.  At best, they are speculative.  If he had ANY actual data to support those vague suggestions, he would have provided it.  But he didn’t.

In early 2021, Dr. Fauci added, “There’s no reason for people to be walking around wearing masks…It might make people feel a little bit better.  It might even block a droplet, buts it is not providing the perfect protection that people think it is.”  Despite this powerful criticism of mask wearing, we have entire states and municipalities mandating the wearing of masks, even outdoors.  Those governors and mayors are saying that they are going to put people in jail for refusing to wear something that even Tony Fauci admits doesn’t work.

Since the beginning of this pandemic, I have been searching for data that would support or repudiate the concept of mask-wearing.  The other day I found a comprehensive, scientifically supported article that looked at the 14 Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT’s) done around the world on the benefits of mask wearing.  Despite the fact that these RTC’s are uniformly regarded as the gold standard in medical research, the CDC has depended on “observational studies” that are not only of lower quality but, “also are more likely to be politicized, as they can inject the researchers’ judgement more prominently into the inquiry and lend themselves, far more than RTC’s, to finding what one wants to find.”

These 14 RTC’s provide the most reliable scientific data because they isolated mitigation techniques like mask-wearing and hand washing, but also included a control group that always did nothing.  THAT is how scientific study is supposed to work.  These 14 RTC’s were completed from 2008 to 2020 all around the world on multiple respiratory viruses.  The largest study, done in 2020 in Denmark with 4,862 participants, was done on Covid-19 and found no statistically significant difference between the results of its mask-wearing group and its control group which did not wear masks.

Here is the overall conclusion drawn from these 14 RCT’s.  “In sum, of the 14 RCT’s that have tested the effectiveness of masks in preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses, three suggest, but do not provide any statistically significant evidence…that masks might be useful. The other 11 RTC’s suggest that masks are either useless or are actually counterproductive.  Of the three studies that provided statistically significance evidence…one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than hand hygiene alone, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than nothing, and one found that cloth masks were less effective than surgical masks.”

Finally, since I have noticed so many people wearing cloth masks (I estimate that 50% of the masks I see are cloth) I felt I should specifically give the results of one study that tested cloth masks against surgical masks.  That study was done in 2015 in Hanoi, Vietnam.  This RCT “found that those in cloth masks were 13 times more likely to develop an influenza-like illness than those in the surgical mask group – a statistically significant difference…The authors write that wearing a cloth mask may potentially increase the infection risk.”  And the lion-share of our children (I estimate 80%) are wearing camo or superhero or outfit coordinated cloth masks.  The data (the science) would suggest that they would be better off wearing nothing!!  

To all parents of students and school administrators and teachers, I would suggest you do what you constantly say you do – Follow the Science.  The data confirms that children under the age of 18 are far less vulnerable to this virus and its Delta variant than  older adults.  Out of the 633,000 people in the US who have died from this virus, only 361 were children under 18.  That’s only .06% (six hundredths of one percent) despite the fact that this group represents almost 25% of the US population.  And most of those mortalities were accompanied by some sort of co-morbidity.  Follow the science.  Children under 18 are at almost no risk of this virus.  Let these children and their parents make the choice to wear or not wear masks, which these studies suggest are “useless” or even “counterproductive”.  If teachers are concerned for their health, they can wear masks (which don’t work for them either) or get vaccinated.  But let our children go.

Below is a link to the entire article.  Just copy and paste it into your browser.  You’ll be more informed than 99.9% of the general public and 100% of our politicians!

https://www.city-journal.org/do-masks-work-a-review-of-the-evidence?wallit_nosession=1#.YRSMsaJRXXk.twitter