Update on Cochrane Review of Masks
June 11 | Posted by mrossol | CDC NIH, Mandates, Prasad, ScienceIt’s devastating for the editor. So appreciate the work that Mr Prasad does. He is not afraid to speak what he believes. Kind of what real science should look like. mrossol
Source: Update on Cochrane Review of Masks
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During the pandemic, my colleagues and I performed a systematic review of community masking. We found simply no good evidence to support masking or mask mandates.
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Afterwards Cochrane published a similar (tbh even deeper) analysis and concluded that there was simply no good evidence that community masking slows the spread of respiratory viruses.
The standards used for our analysis are the same whether the intervention is a pill or a policy intervention: what do the best randomized studies show?
Notably the science community did run 3 additional masking RCTs during the pandemic. GuineaBissau is negative/ low utility. Denmark is negative. And Bangladesh was presented as successful, but reanalysis shows it was not a properly conducted randomized trial and thus… biased.
Accepting the fact that community (key word) masking probably does nothing is difficult for many. They don’t understand how poor compliance can thwart bio plausibility. They don’t understand how prolonged exposure time can thwart a marginal change in particle exposure. Masking is tied to political party and identity.
The Editor in Chief of Cochrane was unhappy with the popular interpretations of the analysis and issued a rare statement saying they would rethink the wording to make it clear that masks *might* work bc the confidence interval was broad.
I was curious at this announcement, so my research team looked at all Cochrane reviews on topics with negative overall conclusions and wide confidence intervals. We found that they were always interpreted as negative except for this one case. As such, the EIC was acting inappropriately.
Now after a lengthy discussion among the staff, Cochrane has concluded that no changes will be made. The EIC lost.
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What’s the take away? There never was any evidence to support community masking and certainly not mask mandate and certainly not in 2 year olds. Leaders in the US failed to run even a single community RCT. Instead belief was faith based. Although many smart people still love masking, history will view that the mask policies of covid were unscientific and dishonest. They should not be repeated.
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