Day 1103: Masks Still Don't Work

Everyone and their brother has reported on the latest meta-study showing masks don't work. Just for example, Vinay Prasad lights into the "religion" of masking in "The Cochrane Review on Masks is Damning":

Here is the big summary finding. With 276,000 participants in RCTs or cluster RCTs, masking does nothing. No reduction in influenza like or Covid like illness and no reduction in confirmed flu or COVID. That’s stone cold negative. See those effect sizes and confidence intervals.

[table omitted]

This is why Fauci said what he said initially on 60 [M]inutes. He wasn’t lying. The best evidence showed no benefit. That was before we saw a concerted campaign to promote cloth masking—a bizarre way to treat anxiety. People routinely wore cloth masks outside—something that was less 21st century and more 3rd century, akin to animal sacrifice, and dancing to make the rains come.

The section on N95 masks was also devastating.

He recommends reading the whole thing. Eugyppius talks about pro-maskers' reaction to the news:

Plainly, the conviction that mask mandates were necessary came first; The Science followed. All the while, though, the evidence didn’t go away. It was just suspended slightly out of view, diluted with weak excuses and deprived of influence over policy, until the ideological fervour dissipated and the plain truth could be spoken again. The lesson is that regime authorities, particularly when they enjoy the collaboration of the press and academia, can tell almost any lie, but keeping the truth out of view requires active effort, and sooner or later their myths come crashing down. The mask mythology was among the first to take shape, and it has been the first to fall.

In the coming months other pandemic fantasies will also begin [to] unravel.