In February 2020, NIH director Anthony Fauci was privately asked in an email by former Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell what he advised regarding mask use.
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He replied, “Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading the infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection. The typical mask you buy in the drugstore is not really effective in keeping out viruses, which are small enough to pass through the material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keeping out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you. I do not recommend that you wear a mask….”
A month later, he went on 60 minutes and repeated the same advice stating, “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” noting they should be used only for sick people as source control.
“When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is,” said Fauci.
Of course, we all know his position on universal masking did a complete 180 just weeks later. By late May-June of 2020, mask mandates were sweeping the nation. My first reaction was to be highly skeptical. It was clear from the outset that liberals constituted most of the public outcry for universal masking. So, I spent hours finding and reading as many relevant studies as I could put my hands on. There were quite a few spanning decades from around the world that had looked at various types of masks as an intervention versus other respiratory viruses, mainly the seasonal flu. None of them made a solid case for masks. Then came a trove of hastily constructed studies in the summer of 2020. Follow the science! The activists cried, pointing at these biased excuses for research. And they came just in time to ensure our kids would be masked in the fall.
What came out on January 30th should settle the debate. The Cochrane Library from the U.K. has been called the “gold standard” in data-driven medical research. They published an update to a meta-study that encompassed 78 relevant studies from around the world concluding that masks, including N95s, made no difference in COVID transmission rates for the wearer or those in proximity. “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.”
Where this gets really interesting is when you look at what the lead author had to say in an interview that came out a few days later. Maryanne Demasi conducted the interview with Tom Jefferson of Oxford University and published it on Substack. Demasi made it clear that the research and conclusions that were just released were essentially available in the summer of 2020 “when all the craziness began when academics and politicians started jumping up and down about masks.” He went on to say, “We call them “strident campaigners.” They are activists, not scientists.” referring to the wide array of self-proclaimed experts that couldn’t live with personal choice and insisted on mandates.
When asked about Fauci’s rapid change of position, Jefferson said, “Governments had bad advisors from the very beginning… They were convinced by non-randomized studies, flawed observational studies. A lot of it had to do with appearing as if they were “doing something.”
In early 2020, when the pandemic was ramping up, we had just updated our Cochrane review ready to publish…but Cochrane held it up for 7 months before it was finally published in November 2020.
Those 7 months were crucial. During that time, it was when policy about masks was being formed. Our review was important, and it should have been out there.”
He added that “Cochrane decided it needed an “extra” peer-review. And then they forced us to insert unnecessary text phrases in the review like “this review doesn’t contain any covid-19 trials,” when it was obvious to anyone reading the study that the cut-off date was January 2020.
Demasi asked, “Do you think Cochrane intentionally delayed that 2020 review?” and Jefferson replied, “During those 7 months, other researchers at Cochrane produced some unacceptable pieces of work, using unacceptable studies, that gave the ‘right answer.'”
And so, “the science” was delayed and then diluted to avoid conflicting with the mask narrative and ensuing mandates. What came out just recently wasn’t just the truth about masks. It was the information we needed in the summer of 2020 to prevent two years of mask wars in public places. It was the truth we needed to prevent the social and emotional damage to children that happened in our schools.
So, the debate is finally over. Masks don’t work to prevent the spread of Covid. Not for the wearer and not for those in proximity. The would-be altruists have been exposed as unscientific bullies.
The sad thing is that it’s not clear they will ever face the truth because this story has been ignored by most of the mainstream media. Shocking.
