What makes this all alarming is that Tufekci is an academic sociologist, with no training in medicine or public health. And yet, she managed to alter public health policy with a bunch of tweets and an essay followed, two months later, by a co-authored scientific preprint that promoted mask mandates. “We recommend that public officials and governments strongly encourage the use of widespread face masks in public, including the use of appropriate regulation,” it said.
The study’s lead author is Jeremy Howard, a mask advocate and Australian software entrepreneur, who, like Tufekci, has no training in public health or medicine. The review was later published in a medical journal and remains the only article I could find that Tufekci has published in the scientific literature on masks.
Despite such a thin publishing record in the scientific literature, the Raleigh News & Observer (an influential paper among academics) anointed Tufekci a Covid media hero who had challenged the medical and public health establishment and got the facts right — but with essays, not science. “Instead of conducting lab experiments related to Covid-19, she used her platform on Twitter and in the opinion sections of Scientific American, The Atlantic and The New York Times to inform the public with practical advice about what to do and why.”
In retrospect, it’s hard to read this article — celebrating an academic for doing science by essay — and not wonder if it’s a satirical piece for The Onion: “Monkey Solves Grand Unified Theory of Physics in a Single Tweet.” Nonetheless, Tufekci played along with the gag, amazed at her magical ability to solve complex scientific problems without doing any actual science — just writing essays.
“I never thought in a million years I’d be writing something that basically said the World Health Organization and CDC and medical establishment in the United States and Europe are wrong,” she told the paper. But one tiny obstacle stood between Tufekci and full acceptance of mask mandates: Cochrane.
When Cochrane released their mask update in January 2023, which again said the efficacy of masks was uncertain, critics of pandemic policies naturally used these scientific conclusions to cast doubt on the mask advocates. “Mask mandates were a bust,” wrote New York Times columnist Brett Stephens, citing an interview by Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane mask review. “Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as ‘misinformers’ for opposing mandates were right.”
Tufekci’s rise to public prominence is tied closely to her mask advocacy. Reading this column in The New York Times, the most prominent paper in the country, and where she also worked, must have been irksome for her. Three days after the Stephens column, Tufekci emailed Cochrane for an interview. But rather than contacting Jefferson or any of the scientists who authored the review, Tufekci went straight to Michael Brown, one of Cochrane’s editors. She also asked if he would introduce her to Cochrane editor-in-chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, to which Brown agreed.
“Tufekci’s rise to public prominence is tied closely to her mask advocacy.”
Some days later, Karla Soares-Weiser emailed a Cochrane official that she had been “back and forth with NYT about the mask review”, asking for help responding to questions. “I’m navigating a difficult situation,” Soares-Weiser emailed. Tufekci meanwhile, had contacted Jefferson for comment, but he ignored her.
The very following day, the Times published Tufekci’s “masks work” essay. Given the way American journalism works, the piece had most likely been written and edited before she had contacted Jefferson the night before for comment. Although 12 different scientists had been involved in writing and researching the Cochrane mask review, Zeynep singled out Jefferson. She named him several times in her essay for making alleged false statements about the pandemic. Hours later, Cochrane rushed out Soares-Weiser’s statement, and then apologised to the review authors. “We hoped to inform you all before publication but have been blindsided by the NYT and have scrabbled to upload our statement,” Cochrane emailed the review authors.
This did not go down well with the authors. “I will not speak for the others but am deeply distressed by this course of events which have occurred without our knowledge,” replied Jon Conly, a professor and former head of the department of medicine at the University of Calgary. He insisted that Cochrane had thrown the review authors under the bus. “Very naive to think you and the [editor in chief Soares-Weiser] spoke to the media at NYTs (without informing us) and would trust them and that they would not immediately publish what you said, especially with this woman who is well known as a controversial writer.”
“There was no intention to ‘throw you or anyone under the bus’,” Brown responded, “since I would be throwing myself under the bus as the sign-off editor.” He added that he had told Tufekci that he stood by the review and had asked her to contact the review authors for their statements.
Conly confirmed to me later that Tufekci — who did not respond to repeated requests for comment — never contacted him, even though he is named as the review’s corresponding author, who Tufekci should have contacted for comment. “Not sure who Tufekci would have corresponded with to find any of the authors who would have agreed with her,” Conly said.
As I have seen from internal correspondence, Cochrane’s editors then began discussing how to manage blowback from Soares Weiser’s statement. Brown reminded them the update used the same language from 2020 and that revisions were now being suggested because Cochrane was flinching from media critics, not because the science was wrong. “Although I agree that the proposed changes to the [summary] add clarity, it was only under intense media coverage and criticism that these revisions were suggested,” Brown wrote.
Seeking another angle to quell criticism of Soares-Weiser’s statement, Lisa Bero, a professor medicine at the University of Colorado who serves as Cochrane ethics advisor, suggested that Cochrane publish comments being submitted by outsiders that were also critical of the mask review. “That should be published as soon as possible (following screening for libel or profanity),” Bero emailed. “It is important for readers to know that criticism has not just come through the media, but through the formal channels that we have.”
But according to Conly, the review had already undergone extensive, detailed peer review. “If the editor-in-chief and ethics officer were colluding to find criticism afterwards,” he told me, “that would appear to be unethical.”
Meanwhile, Soares-Weiser’s statement and Tufekci’s article were having a significant effect outside the organisation, spurring several news articles as well as ridicule of the mask authors on social media. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of several books on pandemics, Laurie Garret, accused the mask authors of fraud. “[T]hese bozos have undermined public faith in [masks] & biz/govt willingness to promote use,” she posted on X. (It is notable that, prior to the pandemic, Garrett posted on X in 2018 that masks don’t work for influenza and other respiratory viruses. “We have also known for 100+ years that masks do no good.”)
The argument was even reverberating through politics. Testifying in her final appearance before Congress, CDC Director, Rochelle Walensky, cited Soares-Weiser’s statement, falsely stating that Cochrane had “retracted” the mask review. Congressional staff were forced to correct her testimony: “The lack of trust in public health officials is becoming an enormous problem,” a congressional staffer later wrote.
Word of Soares-Weiser’s actions even reached the highest levels of the British government. That summer, while she was in London for a Cochrane event, an MP invited her to Parliament’s Portcullis House to explain her statement. However, according to a staffer in Parliament, Soares-Weiser dodged the invite and never appeared.
“Word of Soares-Weiser’s actions even reached the highest levels of the British government.”
Although he was noted prominently in the “masks work” essay, Cochrane’s Michael Brown told me the Times had engaged in a lot of of “spinning” of his comments and he hadn’t been aware that Tufekci had campaigned for mask mandates, nor that she had published a review whose conclusions contradicted those of Cochrane. In her initial email to Brown, Tufekci had highlighted her ostensibly scientific background, introducing herself as both a New York Times columnist and an academic with a background in statistics and causal inference, and an interest in scientific reviews. “I use and participate in reviews myself (I’m writing one in my own field soon) and thus am familiar with many of the challenges and issues.”
This is something of an embellishment of Tufekci’s bona fides. According to Google Scholar, she has published no academic articles this year and the only one she published in all of 2023 was an opinion piece in Nature. As for the review article Tufekci had pointed to, it has never appeared.
“I’m a trusting person,” Brown told me, explaining that he had never looked up Tufekci’s history before speaking with her. “She’s definitely more of a journalist than a scientist. I didn’t agree with her, the way she then spun it: masks work.”
“The bottom line is that [our] review was well-done,” Brown said. As for the proposed changes to review’s language, Brown explained that the summary language had been written by Cochrane staff reporting to Karla Soares-Weiser, not Tom Jefferson and the other review authors.
“She sort of got caught in the crossfire,” Brown said of Soares-Weiser, adding that colleagues pressured her because they didn’t like the conclusions that there is no evidence masks work. “Which is really hard for her, for someone in her position as editor in chief.”
Brown made his views on the science clear last September when he emailed the organiser of a talk he was giving that masks “do not make a major impact at the community level when promoted as a public health intervention”. He also told me that a recent scientific review in the Annals of Internal Medicine complemented the findings of Cochrane. “In the end, the conclusions were the same.”
But while Cochrane has ceased attacking its own mask review, The New York Times continues to promote the “masks work” narrative — despite evidence to the contrary. Last May, the paper ran an essay by Tulane University’s John M. Barry. In his piece, Barry wrote: “Masks present a much simpler question. They work. We’ve known they work since 1917, when they helped protect soldiers from a measles epidemic.”
And yet, we know this is not true. Even Barry does. As he wrote his bestselling tome, The Great Influenza: “The masks worn by millions were useless as designed and could not prevent influenza. Only preventing exposure to the virus could.”
But as has become clear, and as Brown confirmed in our conversation, masks are no longer about science: “Instead of just talking about the science, it became a political thing. And people fell on one side or the other,” he said. “And they said some things, and then they have to back up what they’ve said previously. And they’re just digging a hole deeper and deeper.”
What The New York Times did was to embrace a scientific opinion — masks work! — and then defend that notion like a divine ruling — ignoring contrary evidence and attacking researchers such as Tom Jefferson who have spent decades toiling away on a once-obscure topic. “This is what the future holds,” Jefferson told me. “It’s an upside-down world. It’s the death of science.”
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SubscribeAh, Zeynep Tufekci. She is a charlatan who claims knowledge and expertise that she does not have. She is a sociologist and a journalist, yet she claims to be an expert in causal inference and systems thinking. Her work on masks to fight respiratory viruses (as outlined so carefully in this article) and on the causes of the Boeing 737 MAX crashes has been particularly amateurish and erroneous.
Yet Zeynep Tufekci has risen from a the lowest ranks of professor at the University of Maryland and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to Harvard and then Columbia and then a prestigious professorship at Princeton. Top that off with her sinecure as a columnist at the New York Times.
Zeynep Tufekci is credited with the ability to explain complex ideas to a broad audience, and she is indeed good at that. Too bad the complex ideas are ones she doesn’t understand and doesn’t bother to learn. She sounds convincing but her words are fluff rather than substance.
I’ve exchanged brief messages with Zeynep Tufekci about masks for Covid-19, the origin of the SARS CoV-2 virus, and the Boeing 737 MAX crashes. She has always been willing to respond, but when she does she always shows how shallow her understanding is.
Zeynep Tufekci claimed in an interview with Ezra Klein in the New York Times that her favorite book is Normal Accidents by Princeton sociologist Charles Perrow, but she doesn’t understand even the most basic concepts from that book (or his later book The Next Catastrophe). She claims to be an expert on causal inference, but she has no knowledge of the fundamental work of Turing prize winner Judea Pearl on that topic.
Zeynep Tufekci is not a stupid person; she seems very bright. That makes it sad that she does so often claim knowledge she does not have and perpetrate a fraud on people through her writings and in climbing the academic ladder. She’s not quite the shameless self-promoter of a Greta Thunberg, but close.
Man, this is depressing. I never wore a mask or got the clot shot, nor did I get the WuFlu, but I know people who are still wearing those silly paper masks made on some dirt-floored hut in India.
I guess there will always be credentialed hucksters spouting nonsense that the govern-me-harder-daddy people will trust and follow. There are commenters here who cannot let go of what was proved to be a gigantic lie.
Is it not obvious that one or more security services could well be behind this skullduggery with “Tufekci” as one of their many public facing puppets? Might that explain why one nobody hack with no relevant scientific background could supposedly change global and US national public health policy with “essays”? Why is there no mention of at least the possibility of this in the article? Has the author considered it? I would be most interested in his thoughts.
Also, no-one was posting on “X” in 2018, or 2020! Investigative journalists should leave the rewriting of history to the experts …
‘Follow the science’ is the stupidest soundbite of this decade. Once this became political, that phrase was deployed in the most ugly fashion. The contrast with the science around the pandemic and e.g. the science of the Cass report is astonishing. People cited science to justify their beliefs and now ignore science to justify their beliefs. Its almost as thought people just want to justify their beliefs.
The current state of media and journalism reminds me of showing up at a party early in the morning after everyone there is drunk and no longer making any sense. They all THINK they are making sense and they think all the drunk people they are talking are making sense and that everyone is having incredible insights.
What a lot of addled people.
So the public was lied to. By America’s alleged paper of record. What a shock. Journalism continues to make a mockery of itself. Whether it is carrying water for Anthony Fauci, lying about Joe Biden, or engaging in obviously revisionist history about Kamala Harris, the legacy media keeps eroding its own credibility and does not seem to care about that.
Essentially, the authorities in most countries didn’t know what to do but felt the need to reassure the public by doing something.
“Something must be done”: the four most dangerous words in the English language.
If a tin god of Dark Triads was possible, Tufekci is it.
The mask has become the holy symbol of membership to the heavy-on-the-D-Factor congregation and serves a warning akin to the vibrant coloring of poisonous animals.
This article is mystifying. Why on earth would scientists anywhere–or the editors of information sources diffusing scientific findings to the public–give two puffs of atomic emanation for opinions published in the New York Times, or any other ideologically captured mainstream media outlet? If the average person can live without his/her opinions being in complete conformity with those of MSM journalists and pundits, why can’t they?
I literally left my “healthcare” career – let my license expire and all – after 30 years when we started withholding efficacious treatment and allowing people to die so that an EUA would be “justified” (read $$$$$$).
I truly believed in what I did and what medicine was supposed to be capable of and in its altruism – until the curtain was thoroughly pulled back and Cthulhu was revealed.
Is it an upside down world? Or is it magical thinking? Or is it just petty authoritarians using any opportunity to dictate to others and hide their errors?
Masks knitted from thread stops viruses.
A man with XY chromosomes is a woman.
The sectarian murder of young people isn’t terrorism.
The octagenarian who can’t string a sentence together doesn’t have dementia.
The wind turbines that have been generating next to nothing for 4 days are going to provide nearly all our power.
Etc etc etc.
Trust the Proletarian Science.
Yes, Lysenko knew the power of political authority in bolstering politically “convenient” but bogus science, so did Galileo when it came to politically/religiously inconvenient science.
“New York Times Bites Dog”. It all comes down to clicks.
Thanks For Your Thought. IDM Crack
The point about ‘follow the science’ during COVID is that, on masks and many other aspects of the response, there wasn’t any science. Science is a type of knowledge that is arrived at using the scientific method. This is an extremely rigourous method of generating and checking knowledge, which is why scientific knowledge is held in such high regard. The existing scientific knowledge as contained in the WHO guidelines before COVID hit was chucked out when the Chinese led the way in lockdowns and masking, and there was no time to do the experiments, data checking etc. that could have generated actual science to replace that before all these policies were implemented.
The only thing that was followed in COVID policy-making was the response of the PRC, and they responded the way they respond to most things, with heavy-handed suppression. It is to the great shame and discredit of the political class in the supposedly free West, and their media cheerleaders, that the response to a crisis was to copy the communist party of China, describe that as science, and then suppress dissent.
Four Pests Campaign.
“follow the science opinion being pushed as an axiom”
Given that the scientific process when applied to macro questions in many cases will confirm what is already known to work / not work (being aligned with what is efficacious in practice), anyone who insists on “following the science” is almost definitionally using an appeal to authority to justify a questionable personal or political opinion. In other words, you wouldn’t have to say “follow the science” if there were actually practical benefits that individuals would be experiencing.
Instead, in this case it relies on negative proof at the individual level – the person wearing the mask doesn’t get sick (we are all mostly always not getting sick). So people who want to believe in it feel justified.
There were a lot of bad things about the Pandemic, but the mask-wearing was the worst bit from my perspective. The things were hideous.
Some people lost their business and livelihood, people died, people lost loved ones and/or couldn’t get near them while they were dying.
So I suppose you’re lucky if the “worst bit” was wearing a piece a cloth that medical personnel have to wear all the time.
Yes, I accept all that. However, you must have missed the “from my perspective” bit. Hardly anyone in my part of the world died of COVID, and it didn’t have any impact on my livelihood. I wore a mask VERY infrequently (I work in a small firm, and we ignored the workplace mask mandates), but on the few occasions I did, I found it utterly horrible.
I live just south of San Francisco in a very liberal area where safetyism runs rampant. I went to my public library today to work for a few hours. About half the staff still wear masks, and about a third of the people working at the computers with me had masks on too. You would think the pandemic was still raging.
Today I didn’t, but sometimes I like to pretend to cough and sneeze, or blow my nose loudly. You should see the looks I get. Hilarious. Or at least I think so. My wife doesn’t. Whenever she goes out in public, she still wears a mask herself.
Perhaps she is just modest and doesn’t want to inflame male lust through gazing on her beautiful face. Not much difference between religiously imposed modesty and politically imposed modesty. Both unscientific.
and both satisfy a need to exert control over others.
You appear to be a man well acquainted with the lack of scientific support for mask-wearing and yet you have not been able to persuade your wife to abandon the practice. I was struck by the fact that those referred to as promoting mask wearing were predominantly women. Is there a tendency for women to favour conformist safetyism that is less pronounced in men?
Once was (less pronounced in men); not so sure anymore.
Danger should be your middle name
Maybe it is. Maybe he is Carlos Danger Danger.
Yes, I can see the humour in that. When we had a mask mandate in the (Australian) State in which I live, I always made an obvious point of lifting the corner of the thing about once every three breaths for a big exhale and inhale.
Fascinating insights into the dysfunctional relationship between the credentialed technocrats in the bureaucracy and regime media. The CDC gains credibility for bad policy by appealing to the vanity, ignorance and power of a NYT writer. The writer gains fame, prestige and power by promoting bad science that enhances the credibility of the CDC.
Its like a cosplay being played out by a handful of technocrats. None of them care about truth, science or the interests of other people, yet their actions have profound impact on hundreds of millions of people, maybe even billions. I don’t have an issue with a handful of technocrats wielding such power. It’s only a problem when they are incompetent and guided by motives other than truth.
For God’s sake, let it go!
No. Those who perpetrated this global crime need to pay for it.
Why? Why should accept being brazenly lied to by control freaks?
no. it should be a learning experience for the “next time” when i see people wearing the cloth over their faces I pretend they arent there as my little rebellion.. my mask said. worn by force . not by fear.. my other mask was a piece of net with a spider in the middle.. people who wear masks in stores should pick up all of the litter masks in the parking lots
So … “When Cochrane released their mask update in January 2023, which again said the efficacy of masks was uncertain“. Presumably that means that they may well have a measurable effect, but that is not yet absolutely proven. So what’s the big deal? What exactly is the issue with wearing a small mask when that may well reduce the incidence of infection? It doesn’t impinge upon your life, economy or whatever, and let’s face it, why do medical personnel wear masks for operations etc? And now, thanks to the covid virus mutating to a far less severe version (and, shock horror, quite probably because the vaccines have been efficacious) we worry less about the issues involved in catching it, so are less concerned about preventing that infection by wearing masks.
Where was all this stress on the supposed horrors of mask-wearing when we have seen people from SE Asia wearing them for decades?
You seem to have missed the key fact in the article: It is scientifically demonstrated that masks are ineffective in controlling respiratory virus infections. Full stop.
Yes, masks are worn frequently in East Asia. The key reason is that someone who has an active cold does not want to be coughing on others. It is a courtesy to others, no more.
Separately, many Asian cities also have very bad particulate loads in the ambient air. Particulate pollution is hard on the respiratory system, and masks are effective at blocking particulates.
My understanding is that the masks are meant to reduce the spread of airborne germs–“reduce”, mind you, not “prevent.” And they do not prevent the user from inhaling a germ. That can only be accomplished by use of something like a gas mask. So, if you don’t want the world to catch your germs (COVID or otherwise), wear a mask but don’t think that the mask is going to prevent YOU from catching airborne germs.
Again – upper respiratory viruses (flu, corona, RSV) spread by aerosol. Aerosols are by orders of magnitude smaller than the mesh of masks. So masks cannot contain viruses to any extent. Both inhaling and exhaling, you’re exchanging the same amount of air with or without mask, it’s just that with mask, your lungs are more stressed.
At least masks don’t breed viruses, that’s not how viruses work. But they are exuberantly fertile environments for fungi.
A properly fitted and used N95 mask will filter out viruses like SARS CoV-2.
No, it won’t.
An N95 mask is certified as a particulate filter mask. It will catch particulates 0.3 microns or larger.
Viruses are particles, and they are never floating naked in the air. At the smallest (when they spread as aerosols) they are still in clumps with water that are at least 1 micron in size.
Even if a 0.1 micron virus were floating naked in the air an N95 would filter it by electrostatic charge or catch it mechanically in the mesh because it would jump around from the jostling of Brownian motion.
These N95 masks have been developed and tested as medical masks long before the pandemic, and they do filter respiratory viruses very well. No question about that. The science behind them was only confirmed during the pandemic.
The same is not true, of course, of cloth masks, which are pretty much worthless except as a facial decoration to signal virtue. They won’t filter anything the size of aerosolized virus.
So assuming you are correct, once a virus-laden aerosol is caught in the mask mesh, what happens then? Unless you remove and dispose of the mask then and there, more and more viruses will accumulate. Since you’re still breathing, viruses gradually work through the mesh.
Viruses are not alive, so they don’t die. They just wait until you finally inhale them – deeply, because you’re breathing forcefully.
I can’t respond to this — it’s wrong on too many levels.
There’s a common misconception about filters like N95 masks and HEPA filters. Some think that they will not filter particulates smaller than 0.3 microns. That’s false. They are rated at how many particulates of that size they will filter because that is the hardest size to filter. But they will filter particulates of any size.
Just because you stop the aerosol particle carrying the virus does not mean you have stopped the virus. A virus is be order of magnitude smaller, and much small than the mask mesh.
Thanks to Carlos Danger for clarifying how respirator masks work.
Many don’t know the physics involved. There are other, more influential mechanisms involved than the basic straining/sieve method, which only accounts for removing about 1% of particles. These mechanisms allow respirators to block viruses far smaller than the size of the holes in the filter.
In a respirator, it’s not the fibres themselves that matter, because everything is sticky at microscopic scale. Van der Waals forces between molecules is more than enough to hold very small things in place.
N95’s are also electrotized to give them a permanent electric field which allows them to capture 10x more particles than regular fibres, even neutral particles. Their charged fibres work like magnets (look up “electrets”).
With multiple layers of fibres, particles larger than 1 micron typically travel in a straight line so are almost guaranteed to strike a fibre and stick. Particles smaller than 0.1 micron are so light that collisions with air molecules bounce them around so they move in a random zigzag pattern (the Brownian motion Carlos mentioned). This makes it extremely likely that such particles will bump into fibres and stick.
For these reasons, respirator-type masks – *if properly fit* – can block almost 100% of the smallest and largest particles. If >95% of medium size particles can be filtered, the respirator is rated N95; if 99% then it’s rated N99, and if 99.97% it’s N100.
Even with an improper fit, these masks significantly lower infection risk.
What a cogent and informative comment. I learned a lot from it. Thanks.
The mask mandates were part of an arsenal of measures of social control: fear, masks, lockdowns, demonising of dissent and dissenters, followed by vaccine mandates, employment restrictions and mandates, border closures and controls. The masks were all the more powerful as they were not culturally familiar. They had a depersonalising effect that added to fracturing of social cohesion and lead to increased isolation and alienation. Every person for themselves, a stranger is your enemy. Zoom is the same as face to face.
I hated them. And I found it amusing that the same people who had argued profusely against burqas (because they were dehumanising and suppressed a person’s individuality and identity) suddenly found no similar problems with covid masking.
I suffer from emphysema. Mask wearing was not a possibility, even with supplemental oxygen. Imagine that.
A friend is deaf. She functions perfectly thanks to her skill with lip reading. Which is not possible while everyone is masked. Imagine that.
Hi Laurence, thank you for mentioning those constraints. They’re easily imagined when someone mentions them, but are otherwise easily unrecognized, particularly among people unused to thinking about disabilities. That has to be incredibly aggravating. The constraints are really important in considering public policy.
With regard to working toward more enlightened policy going forward, you may be interested in a recent meta-analysis on the state-of-the-science of masking, especially because one of the co-authors includes an epidemiologist who, among other things, studies “the syndemic relationships between infectious diseases, chronic conditions, and structural inequities. She is deaf with cochlear implants and disability advocacy is an important aspect of her work.”
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/cmr.00124-23
Their conclusions and recommendations make good sense, I think, in part because they take into consideration the important contexts you mentioned.
Cheers.
If people from SE Asia want to wear masks, they are at liberty to. How is that any business of those of us in the West.
If people in SE Asia want to wear safety belts, how is that any business of ours if they have relatively low traffic fatalities while we in Libertania are free to go beltless and keep dying like flies?
It just seems good sense to look at how others live and govern themselves, in case we learn of ways that might improve our lives. This principle — this business — goes for individuals and it goes for states.
It doesn’t mean we have to slavishly copy others, of course. We can reflect on how a potentially helpful thing might be adapted to suit us.
Put another way, why would we instead make it our business to ignore what others are doing, even if they seem to profit from doing it?
I am speaking personally, of course, but the idea that wearing something as uncomfortable and restrictive as a mask could be said to involve “improving our lives” is fanciful. I would rather get COVID 10 times over that wear one for even 5 minutes.
I can relate, Martin. For me as well, masking is inconvenient, somewhat restricting, and sometimes uncomfortable. I respect that it’s different for everyone.
I would say that there are a few ways to deal with whatever level of discomfort & restriction a mask presents to an individual.
Trialing different masks to find a more comfortable fit is a good start. (Fyi, skip cloth and surgical masks; they’re relatively weak protections.) Also, realize that you may not need to wear a mask for long periods, in every situation. Frankly, anything helps. There are situations of relatively high risk, such as indoors with poor ventilation and large crowds, where masking is a very good idea. There are simple ways to judge risk contexts, available online, written by specialists.
I’m skeptical about the reasoning that improving our lives by masking is “fanciful.” I think when one understands the pathology of the disease, that idea may not ring true. I’m going to outline reasons, sorry for the length in advance.
A hallmark of SARS2 is a sustained inflammatory response. It’s not primarily a respiratory disease, but a vasculopathic disease, a systemic one. It causes repetitive immune activation leading to multi-system inflammation. It can set up a chronic infection in areas of the body that the immune system can’t effectively defend (called “protected sites”).
Death is by far not the only important risk. And just because the 2nd, 3rd or whichever SARS2 infection doesn’t send a person to hospital, doesn’t mean they’ll be fine on their 10th infection too. This is due to the nonlinearity of the effects of multiple infections. Over time, one’s baseline susceptibility to serious outcomes rises.
Every infection increases risk of diabetes, stroke, heart, kidney disease, and death. The virus kills immune T-cells. It kills brain cells. It causes clots to form everywhere. It causes Long-Covid, with its array of disorders, which can be debilitating and long-lasting.
There is also the impact of co-infections with SARS2 and something else, like flu or RSV. The effects of co-infections are worse.
In the country I live, according to CovidResources Canada (https://covid19resources.ca/, a helpful organization since it is rigorous about data collection and analysis), compared to the lowest point of the pandemic, nationally infections are currently ~12X higher, Long COVID is ~6X higher, hospitalizations are ~18X higher, and deaths are ~12X higher. This is not a benign disease, and it hasn’t gone away. Public Health messaging (or non-messaging) has let us down badly in this regard. Most people here think there’s no problem. They haven’t been affected yet, or very much. It’s a case of out-of-sight, out-of-mind, and understandably, minds want to keep it that way — because it’s more comfortable.
Every reinfection is playing Russian roulette. But again, when you know the pathology of the disease you can at least make informed decisions, for yourself, for your loved ones, and for others around you who can’t help but share the same air. The first-order of protection is against misinformation about the disease and its effects.
We need to be humble about this, and take care. The precautionary principle. We might never get sick, or at least not be able to trace sickness to SARS2 infection. But that is no reason to abandon caution. For example, measles has been around for about 1,000 years, and the virus was identified in 1954. But in all that time we only learned in 2019 what it does to the immune system. (“Measles erases immune ‘memory’ for other diseases” https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03324-7). As for SARS2, we’ve only known about it for 5 years; if it was a drug, scientists wouldn’t be at all confident about its long-term effects.
I think it’s important to remember also that we all breathe the same air. There are vulnerable people all around us. Immune-compromised, and so on. Sometimes they wear headscarves due to cancer treatments, or breath through oxygen tanks, or get around in wheelchairs, or just look as old people do, but often they’re not easily identified. What we do affects them, especially indoors.
It’s the same consideration as a smoker not passing 2nd hand smoke to others, or a restaurant worker infected with Hepatitis A not passing it to customers. We will never know how infecting a stranger turns out, but we at least have enough control to minimize their exposure and potential harm.
More abstractly — and therefore less compelling, I realize that — there is the fact that the whole of society pays the price of sub-critical yet sustained pressure on healthcare systems, workplace absences, and so on.
For these reasons I don’t accept it’s “fanciful” to believe that masking can improve lives. We will be inconvenienced, restricted, sometimes made uncomfortable, but in life we are always weighing values. And again: you don’t need to mask all the time. Everything helps, especially in higher risk contexts. It helps you, and it helps others.
Because it’s easy to misinterpret intentions in this format, I’d like to assure you that I didn’t write this in a combative spirit. We’re all complex beings, living unique lives. All the best.
I had always assumed that mask mandates (and lockdowns) were an arse-covering exercise, i.e. the Government has to be seen to be doing something in case it all goes pear-shaped.
The Left has a fetish for control. They really hate it when you talk back to them and will punish you by any means that come to hand.
I would add that in a 15 March 2023 post in the Trust the Evidence substack Tom Jefferson shared a 15 March email he wrote to the NYT which disclosed:
“I have never met Zeynep Tufekci but the one descriptive review she has written on SARS-CoV-2 is only cited in the Introduction to our Cochrane Review and not included in it as it does not meet our inclusion criteria or definitions for a systematic review. This may or may not be relevant to her personal attacks on my scientific credential.”
And I understand Tufekci did not disclose this to the NYT.
When ideology and politics adopt the mantle of ‘science’ to justify their agendas the real loser is science and those benefit from it. The meaning of science is lost, the method is corrupted, and the ability of intellectual disputes to drive knowledge forward is thwarted. We need more people to understand the real meaning and nature of science so we do not lose its true value to the agendas of politicians, journalists, people pursuing economic success, and ideologues of all kinds.
It was like testing; one minute we don’t test much, then Johnson & Hancock get pilloried on TV because Germany tested loads so we get a stupid target set and p*** away billions on pointless testing.
It was all about being seen to be doing something and passing the test of idiots like Beth Rigby and Robert Peston.
“We study the efficiency of face masks and various respirators on human subjects and breathing mannequins and in terms of penetration of particles through a conventional surgical mask, it may be as much as 50% or even greater,” he explains. “It is useless for people who want to wear this device to protect themselves.”
— Dr. Sergey Grinshpun, director of the University of Cincinnati Center for Health Related Aerosol Studies which has tested the performance of respiratory protective devices against biological agents for nearly three decades.
Just watching the Olympics swimming. Apparently Peaty is there, but the presenters have stated twice ‘and he is wearing a mask’.
So this science is not filtering through yet!
Work to be done.
At least Biden has moved with the times, unlike the Forever Maskers who have turned face masks into a tribal fetish.
Three or four years ago, it was not ridiculous to push for mask mandates on the grounds that they might do some good, even if there wasn’t much in the way of solid scientific evidence for that. It may have been wrong, but it wasn’t stupid or terrible. Quite possibly they do help a little to prevent virus spreading from the lightly infected. But now that Covid is endemic and everyone has been exposed, the common-sense intuition that might have led one to favour mask mandates at that time must surely direct one the other way now.
Recommendations (but not mandates) to wear masks do make sense if officials believe they might do some good. But officials mandating masks — requiring them under threat of punishment — does seem to me to be ridiculous, stupid and terrible if those officials do not have any evidence that masks work to stop the spread. Otherwise, what is the restraint on officials imposing any requirement they please? There is none.
The commentariat do not understand the meaning of science.
Which science? There is “science” which is as we have known it all along, and then there is the progressive hive mind version that they call “THE science”.
It’s a small thing, but it signals that there is only one acceptable and incontrovertible conclusion on a subject or question. There is no room for discussion, THE science has spoken.
Ideology is replacing science unfortunately.
This article isn’t very helpful in gaining understanding, though written by an author apparently focused on disinformation (a brand new line of business that has been proliferating of late). It’s unhelpful because it doesn’t distinguish between kinds of masks, which are designed for different purposes, and it accepts the common but mistaken assumption that RCT’s are the gold standard in all contexts.
Cloth masks and the common blue procedure masks were never designed to protect against airborne pathogens that hang in the air for extended periods of time.
Respirator-type masks – *if properly fit* – can block almost 100% of the smallest and largest particles. If >95% of medium size particles can be filtered, the respirator is rated N95; if 99% then it’s rated N99, and if 99.97% it’s N100.
Even with an improper fit, these masks significantly lower infection risk.
For those interested in a far more rigorous look at mask efficacy, including the Cochrane study controversy, I would point to this recent (May 22, 2024) state-of-the-science, independently peer-reviewed meta-study of the efficacy of masks and respirators in reducing transmission of respiratory infections.
13 authors, different fields, 100+ published reviews & selected primary studies, including re-analyzing contested meta-analyses of key clinical trials, 413 references:
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/cmr.00124-23
Of particular note is the authors’ critique of the supposed gold-standard RCT, misapplied in testing masks.
It’s too bad that the author of this article, a “former congressional investigator,” who publishes “investigative journalism” focused on disinformation, didn’t investigate this informative study and include its findings in his article.
He could also have investigated and quoted what ventilation engineers have to say about masks.
If Trump and Boris Johnston had not been non-persons among the great and the good when Covid broke out, the response to the pandemic might have been very different. I didn’t expect politics to determine how people reacted to Covid but it did. (The story above would make a great movie.) As a non-scientist and a non-medic, I would argue that masks were useful socially even if not scientifically. They made us all aware of the need for care in interacting with each other, they reminded us that we were living through a worrying time and they enhanced social cohesion at a difficult time.