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By the best standards of evidence available, masks do nothing for covid-19. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6
Some people caveat this by saying the evidence against is weak. My response to this is that if you're going to force billions of people to do so, you should have strong evidence in favour, not weak evidence against it. The default position for medical interventions should be that they don't work until proven otherwise. Others argue against the findings on the basis that masks necessarily must work because physics, on the grounds you don't need to do a scientific study to determine if a parachute works. This is called unfalsifiability, and is the classic sign of pseudoscience. Regardless if we did do a study on parachutes and got a null result that would actually be very good evidence against parachutes.
Stuff like this means we need to caveat any claim that Kennedy has wacky beliefs / conspiracy theories with the fact that his political opponents hold the similarly wacky (but in practice far more destructive) belief / conspiracy theory that masks work for covid.
The physics argument is also wrong. It would be akin to saying that a chain link fence can stop a mosquito. Once we understood that aerosol transmission was how covid spread and not droplets the logic for masking was over.
Also, masking was not low cost but high cost. It retarded development in kids, caused psychological issues for all who wore them (ie reinforced the idea one should panic), and seemed to create build up of CO2.
It is also funny because masks have been studied in a lot of other situations and they routinely don’t demonstrate efficacy. Thus the prior should’ve heavily been “masks don’t work.”
This is not how N95 masks work. Their filtering efficiency is better for very small and very large particles than for medium ones. This is why people wear N95s (or better) when dealing with much more serious diseases than covid.
Cloth and surgical masks were always dubious though.
I am making this stat up, but I’d wager that at least 90% of masks used were cloth on surgical. Focusing on N95 (which have increased costs) isn’t talking about the primary or even secondary form of mask. It was always a
Motte and Bailey where people would talk about masking has used and people would respond with N95s. Yet when they spoke about costs, the costs were the masks actually used.
The motte and bailey goes both ways, because people on the other side of the issue claim that masks don't work, period, and then inevitably walk it back (not all masks!)
In practice, N95s don't work either. It's just not as obvious a priori that they wouldn't.
Again, N95s do work, and have kept people from contracting diseases much worse than covid many times.
N95s in practice failed to work against COVID. Whether they worked against diseases "worse than COVID" is immaterial.
N95s do work against covid. Thank you for demonstrating the motte and bailey I am talking about.
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