Allegations that “masks work” and “don’t cause harm” have been enforced by governments and corporations around the world for more than 18 months through arrests, firings, censorship, fines, and denial of access to schools, supermarkets, hospitals, streets, and other public spaces. This has made it virtually impossible for many people to live without complying with mask mandates.
In recent weeks, however, more medical scholars and media outlets are coming to grips with facts about masks that Just Facts has been documenting for more than a year and painstakingly compiled in a September 2021 article sourced with more than 50 peer-reviewed science journals. Here’s a sample of people who are speaking up about the facts and their implications:
Dr. Vinay Prasad—an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco—has written an article that examines the scientific evidence for masking children and concludes that:
Dr. Chad Roy, who specializes in airborne infectious diseases and is a professor of microbiology and immunology at Tulane University School of Medicine, has told the Washington Examiner that:
The Atlantic has published an analysis of school masking policies by three medical scholars—including Dr. Margery Smelkinson, a specialist in infectious diseases at the National Institutes of Health—in which they wrote:
In an article published on Christmas Eve, CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Leana Wen confessed that “cloth masks are little more than facial decorations” and “this is what scientists and public health officials have been saying for months, many months, in fact.” Yet, she fails to tell the entire truth and instructs people to wear N95 masks without conveying their harms or the fact that gold standard studies have only found inconsistent benefits from N95s in healthcare settings, much less community settings.
Fox News has published an article about how YouTube suspended Rand Paul for questioning the effectiveness of cloth masks and that the CDC is edging closer to Paul’s view. The article then links to Just Facts’ research on masks to document the fact that “several studies have shown” cloth masks “are not effective in stopping the spread of viruses like the coronavirus.”
Some of the most powerful proponents of masking continue to spread destructive fictions and withhold genuine facts from people. For a prime example, Google-owned YouTube recently censored a video from Just Facts about the dangers of N95 masks. Even though every fact in the video is documented with data from peer-reviewed science journals, OSHA, and the CDC—YouTube purged it with callous disregard for the health of people, especially children.
Likewise, the New York Times recently reported that Google-owned YouTube suspended conservative talk show host Dan Bongino “after he posted a video saying cloth and surgical masks were useless in stopping the spread of Covid—a false claim that violated the company’s misinformation policy.”
In reality, those “misinformation” policies and other pronouncements of tech giants, government officials, media outlets, and fact checkers often flout basic principles of academic integrity, spread deadly falsehoods, and suppress facts that could help people.
The cracks that are opening in the dogma that “masks work” are just the tip of that iceberg.
James D. Agresti is the president of Just Facts, a think tank dedicated to publishing rigorously documented facts about public policy issues.