Marty Makary MD, MPH and Tracy Beth Høeg, MD, PhD
Marty Makary MD, MPH is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and author. Tracy Beth Høeg, MD, PhD is a physician epidemiologist at the University of California-San Francisco.
‘Don’t tell them I didn’t have it on,’ deadpanned President Joe Biden to a crowd at the White House on Wednesday as he waved a black surgical mask. Less than 48 hours earlier, First Lady Jill Biden tested positive for COVID-19. The President’s test came back negative, but his staff said he would be ‘masking’ for 10-days, in accordance with CDC recommendations. Apparently, he’s not taking that advice very seriously. Biden had also removed his mask on Tuesday during a Medal of Honor ceremony for fellow octogenarian and Vietnam veteran Larry L. Taylor. Then, Biden walked off – maskless – through the audience.
Frankly, the President seems to agree with us on this. One of the largest public health interventions of our era—masking—has been systematically studied by doctors and epidemiologists with impeccable credentials in evidence-based medicine, and they’ve found no evidence that masks reduce COVID infection rates. No wonder Biden thinks mask-wearing isn’t necessary. That’s also the conclusion of reviews by the renowned British medical research group, the Cochrane Collaboration, which recently looked at 17 high-quality, randomized analyses of the effectiveness of mask-wearing.
So why are some in the U.S. – including America’s public health establishment at the Centers for Disease Control – choosing to ignore this?
‘Don’t tell them I didn’t have it on,’ deadpanned President Joe Biden to a crowd at the White House on Wednesday as he waved a black surgical mask. Less than 48 hours earlier, First Lady Jill Biden tested positive for COVID-19. Biden had also removed his mask on Tuesday during a Medal of Honor ceremony for fellow octogenarian and Vietnam veteran Larry L. Taylor. Then, Biden walked off – maskless – through the audience.
For make no mistake, masking is making a comeback as COVID cases tick up around the country. This week, a school district in Maryland reinstated mask mandates for elementary school students exposed to COVID-positive classmates. The children will be compelled to cover their faces for 10 days. A Hollywood studio temporarily re-implemented mask mandates, as did an Atlanta college, which also banned large gatherings on campus. But why? We now know that masking for COVID doesn’t work.
The sad reality is that Americans traumatized by the COVID pandemic are looking to the CDC for thoughtful, sincere guidance – but they’re only receiving confusing, counterfactual gibberish in return. On Saturday, Dr. Anthony Fauci was confronted on CNN over the Cochrane review. He responded by saying ‘yea, but there are other studies.’ Dr. Tom Jefferson from Oxford, who led the Cochrane analysis on masks, responded to Fauci. ‘It might be that Fauci is relying on trash studies,’ he concluded. Indeed.
Possibly, he was thinking of an analysis of Boston schools from the New England Journal of Medicine that claimed mask mandates reduced COVID cases by a whopping 30 percent. That was also found by Dr. Hoeg’s research group, including scientists at UCSF and Stanford, to have used inappropriate methods. When proper routine was followed investigators came to the opposite conclusion.
Public health elites who continue to claim ‘masks work’ are making it clear that they have completely lost their scientific objectivity. In September 2021, medical research as political propaganda hit an all-time high when the CDC released a review of student masking. CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky asserted that schools with mask requirements had a 3.5-fold reduction in COVID outbreaks. But the claim didn’t hold up for long. Just one of the numerous flaws of the study was that many of the school districts involved were not even open during the research period. For that reason alone, many have called for the paper to be retracted.
It must also be recognized that America’s public health recommendations are an outlier. The CDC still recommends masking children as young as two years old during times of high COVID-19 disease burden (except when they nap or eat at school). But many European countries, which largely never recommended masking for kids under six or even 12 years old, have completely abandoned masks in schools.
Though, that’s not to say that masks are entirely useless, or may never be needed in the future. Surgeons wear masks in the operating room to prevent respiratory droplets from entering the surgical field. As physicians, if we see a patient with tuberculosis, we wear tight-fitting N95 masks during the brief patient encounter. It is possible that two people wearing properly fit, high-quality masks can transiently reduce transmission risk, and there may be some theoretical utility to mask-wearing at times of high-viral spread. But proper mask-wearing practices are difficult to enforce. Even medical professionals wearing masks for long durations frequently do so improperly or loosen them near the end of their shift.
The truth is that America’s public health establishment is ignoring this comprehensive body of research simply because they don’t like the results. They’ve abandoned the art of critically appraising research methodology and replaced it with partisan dogma. That’s not how science is supposed to work. And the catastrophic damage already done to trust in public health will only worsen as the intellectual dishonesty and arrogance of these officials persist. Maybe now, as even President Biden, who once said that mask-wearing was a ‘patriotic duty,’ has apparently lost faith in the CDC’s pronouncements, they will come to their senses. But we’re not holding our breath.
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