“We were right,” crows Senator Eric Schmitt, once dubbed “unmasked avenger.” Analysis finds “scientific censorship is often driven by scientists” but hard to prove against COVID heterodoxy.
The best-case scenario for one of the most common COVID-19 interventions may be that it has no measurable effect on infection, recent studies suggest.
A systematic review of studies of mask mandates for children, published Saturday in the British Medical Journal‘s Archives of Disease in Childhood, found “no association” with infection or transmission in 16 of the 22 observational studies and “critical” or “serious” risk of bias in the six countervailing studies. It got the attention of Elon Musk, owner of X, formerly Twitter.
Self-reported SARS-CoV-2 infection was higher the more often people said they wore masks, according to a Norwegian study accepted for publication Nov. 13 in the Cambridge University Press journal Epidemiology and Infection.
The findings cast further doubt on the practice of not only public health authorities but scientists themselves in demonizing science-based skepticism of the effectiveness of COVID interventions, particularly in relation to their potential medical, mental and social harms.