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On 2/22/23 09:40, a425couple wrote:
New York Times
Opinion | The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?
16 hours ago
Opinion
After all we have been told,,, that is a bit unnerving.
OPINION
BRET STEPHENS
The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?
Feb. 21, 2023
A collage of nine photographs of dirty masks discarded on the street. Credit...Benjamin Lowy
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Bret Stephens
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies
conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of
respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last
month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist
who is its lead author, were unambiguous.
“There is just no evidence that they” — masks — “make any difference,”
he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop.”
But, wait, hold on. What about N-95 masks, as opposed to lower-quality
surgical or cloth masks?
“Makes no difference — none of it,” said Jefferson.
What about the studies that initially persuaded policymakers to impose
mask mandates?
“They were convinced by non-randomized studies, flawed observational studies.”
What about the utility of masks in conjunction with other preventive
measures, such as hand hygiene, physical distancing or air filtration?
“There’s no evidence that many of these things make any difference.”
These observations don’t come from just anywhere. Jefferson and 11
colleagues conducted the study for Cochrane, a British nonprofit that is
widely considered the gold standard for its reviews of health care data.
The conclusions were based on 78 randomized controlled trials, six of
them during the Covid pandemic, with a total of 610,872 participants in multiple countries. And they track what has been widely observed in the
United States: States with mask mandates fared no better against Covid
than those without.
Dig deeper into the moment.
No study — or study of studies — is ever perfect. Science is never absolutely settled. What’s more, the analysis does not prove that proper masks, properly worn, had no benefit at an individual level. People may
have good personal reasons to wear masks, and they may have the
discipline to wear them consistently. Their choices are their own.
But when it comes to the population-level benefits of masking, the
verdict is in: Mask mandates were a bust. Those skeptics who were
furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as “misinformers”
for opposing mandates were right. The mainstream experts and pundits who supported mandates were wrong. In a better world, it would behoove the
latter group to acknowledge their error, along with its considerable
physical, psychological, pedagogical and political costs.
Don’t count on it. In congressional testimony this month, Rochelle
Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
called into question the Cochrane analysis’s reliance on a small number
of Covid-specific randomized controlled trials and insisted that her
agency’s guidance on masking in schools wouldn’t change. If she ever wonders why respect for the C.D.C. keeps falling, she could look to
herself, and resign, and leave it to someone else to reorganize her agency.
That, too, probably won’t happen: We no longer live in a culture in
which resignation is seen as the honorable course for public officials
who fail in their jobs.
But the costs go deeper. When people say they “trust the science,” what they presumably mean is that science is rational, empirical, rigorous, receptive to new information, sensitive to competing concerns and risks.
Also: humble, transparent, open to criticism, honest about what it
doesn’t know, willing to admit error.
The C.D.C.’s increasingly mindless adherence to its masking guidance is
none of those things. It isn’t merely undermining the trust it requires
to operate as an effective public institution. It is turning itself into
an unwitting accomplice to the genuine enemies of reason and science — conspiracy theorists and quack-cure peddlers — by so badly representing
the values and practices that science is supposed to exemplify.
It also betrays the technocratic mind-set that has the unpleasant habit
of assuming that nothing is ever wrong with the bureaucracy’s well-laid
plans — provided nobody gets in its way, nobody has a dissenting point
of view, everyone does exactly what it asks, and for as long as
officialdom demands. This is the mentality that once believed that China provided a highly successful model for pandemic response.
Yet there was never a chance that mask mandates in the United States
would get anywhere close to 100 percent compliance, or that people would
or could wear masks in a way that would meaningfully reduce
transmission. Part of the reason is specific to American habits and
culture; part of it to constitutional limits on government power; part
of it to human nature; part of it to competing social and economic
necessities; part of it to the evolution of the virus itself.
But whatever the reason, mask mandates were a fool’s errand from the
start. They may have created a false sense of safety — and thus
permission to resume semi-normal life. They did almost nothing to
advance safety itself. The Cochrane report ought to be the final nail in
this particular coffin.
There’s a final lesson. The last justification for masks is that, even
if they proved to be ineffective, they seemed like a relatively
low-cost, intuitively effective way of doing something against the virus
in the early days of the pandemic. But “do something” is not science,
and it shouldn’t have been public policy. And the people who had the
courage to say as much deserved to be listened to, not treated with
contempt. They may not ever get the apology they deserve, but
vindication ought to be enough.
excerpted from middle
Questions about the pandemic
Card 1 of 4
When will the pandemic end? We asked three experts — two immunologists
and an epidemiologist — to weigh in on this and some of the hundreds of
other questions we’ve gathered from readers recently, including how to
make sense of booster and test timing, recommendations for children,
whether getting covid is just inevitable and other pressing queries.
How concerning are things like long covid and reinfections? That’s a difficult question to answer definitely, writes the Opinion columnist
Zeynep Tufekci, because of the lack of adequate research and support for sufferers, as well as confusion about what the condition even is. She
has suggestions for how to approach the problem. Regarding another
ongoing Covid danger, that of reinfections, a virologist sets the record straight: “There has yet to be a variant that negates the benefits of vaccines.”
How will the virus continue to change? As a group of scientists who
study viruses explains, “There’s no reason, at least biologically, that
the virus won’t continue to evolve.” From a different angle, the science writer David Quammen surveys some of the highly effective tools and
techniques that are now available for studying Covid and other viruses,
but notes that such knowledge alone won’t blunt the danger.
What could endemic Covid look like? David Wallace Wells writes that by
one estimate, 100,000 Americans could die each year from the
coronavirus. Stopping that will require a creative effort to increase
and sustain high levels of vaccination. The immunobiologist Akiko
Iwasaki writes that new vaccines, particular those delivered through the
nose, may be part of the answer.
More on the Covid-19 pandemic
Opinion | David Wallace-Wells
9 Pandemic Narratives We’re Getting Wrong
Jan. 4, 2023
Opinion | Frankie Huang
America’s Covid Test Requirement for Chinese Travelers Is a Farce
Jan. 5, 2023
Opinion | Ezekiel J. Emanuel and Matthew Guido
Covid Isn’t the Only Reason Children’s Vaccination Rates Are Falling
Dec. 28, 2022
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the
editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our
articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email:
letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter
(@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Bret Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April
2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal
in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 22, 2023, Section A,
Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Do Something’ Is Not Science. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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