The Covidians are doing all they can to keep
'The Official Narrative' alive, well beyond its 'sell by date'.

Slate ran an unintentionally hilarious article this week headlined “To Mask or Not to Mask: That Is (Somehow) Still a Question.” The sub-headline seems to throw in the towel on masks, saying “The latest, highest quality evidence does not show that masks effectively protect against COVID-19.”

Sounds good, but don’t count your chicken nuggets yet. It’s the best example of the study shell game that I’ve ever seen.

Recently, what should be the final, definitive study examining whether face masks “work” for covid was released, and concluded that they do not work. The study was published by the “Cochrane Group,” which has such a sterling reputation that Slate even began by admitting that fact:
Which brings us to the recent Cochrane Review, which considered whether physical interventions—including masks—reduce the spread of respiratory viruses…
The reason Cochrane Reviews are such a useful tool is because of the strict methodology the authors use to systematically evaluate and assess the quality of evidence about an intervention’s safety and effectiveness. Throughout the process, review authors work with a Cochrane Review Group and editorial team, and the findings undergo peer review. Thus, review findings are seen as a synthesis of the best evidence available….
Cochrane Reviews are widely considered the gold standard of evidence-based medicine.
Systematic. Supervised. Peer reviewed. The gold standard. You’d think that would finally be the end of the mask argument. But as you well know, there are some people that really WANT masks to work; they LIKE the masks; they WANT to keep wearing them, in and out of season. Including Slate.
But there’s a problem. Slate wryly confessed that the “gold standard of studies” found masks don’t work:

“Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference,” the review authors concluded of their work comparing masking with non-masking to prevent influenza or SARS‐CoV‐2. What’s more, even for health care workers providing routine care, “there were no clear differences” between medical or surgical masks versus N95s.
Depressingly, for mask lovers, but wait! Don’t give up yet. There is a shell game to play, and Slate played it with aplomb. Slate’s first move was undermining Cochrane’s conclusion by pointing out that it doesn’t PROVE anything:

But as the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The review doesn’t show that masks definitely do not reduce the spread of COVID—only that studies to date have not proven that they do.
Don’t think too hard about that. Just don’t give up hope! Believe! There could be a new study someday that DOES prove masks work. You never know. You can’t say it can’t happen.

Next, Slate deployed the ad hominem toolset. It questioned the authors’ motives, by darkly implying bias without actually saying it:

There’s been some consternation about the predispositions of the review authors. Tom Jefferson, a senior associate tutor at Oxford University, has spearheaded Cochrane Reviews of interventions to reduce the spread of respiratory viruses since 2006. But Jefferson has raised some eyebrows, as he has publicly expressed skepticism about masks.
Don’t think too hard about this one either, or the peer reviewing, the close supervision, the editorial oversight, or about the fact that the Cochrane Reviews are meta-studies (studies of other studies), and so they depend on other, high-quality, randomized, controlled trials. To Slate, it’s enough that one of the authors MIGHT be a mask denier.
Although Slate admitted that the Cochrane Review was based on SIXTY-SEVEN pre-covid studies plus ELEVEN MORE post-covid studies, Slate wondered whether there have been ENOUGH studies to really get any confidence about the conclusion, because — you never know — all the study participants in all 78 trials could have been lying about their mask habits:

"The drawback of systematic reviews is that they’re only as good as the included studies: a classic case of “garbage in, garbage out.” And indeed, the studies in the Cochrane Review on masking had some issues. It was hard to eliminate bias, and low mask adherence was a problem. “The primary deficiency in the vast majority of studies is that they don’t measure mask wearing through direct observation, said Jason Abaluck, an economics professor at Yale who led the Bangladesh trial. “They simply ask people whether they wear masks. Self-reported mask-wearing doesn’t at all resemble actual mask-wearing.”

Now, Slate’s logic would also torpedo any favorable, pro-mask study, since that study would also have to be based on self-reporting, nor could it be done at scale using direct observation. No mask study can. But so what? If and when Slate gets hold of a pro-mask study, it will forget all about this objection in its delirious joy.

Ultimately, Slate concluded that, since you can’t rely on 78 RCT studies, even though reviewed by the “gold standard” of evidence-based medicine, (why would you?), you just have to decide about masking for yourself.

In other words get ready ...do NOT “trust the science:”

"Mask proponents insist that in the face of uncertainty, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Even if you’re not worried about your own risk, masking protects other people who are more vulnerable. Why not, they ask, since the downsides of masking are negligible?
Ultimately, the decision about whether to mask comes down to personal feelings about risk tolerance, collective action, and the effects of masks—or COVID itself—on quality of life. People disagree on all three counts, so it’s unlikely we will ever come to a consensus. It doesn’t look like “the science” is going to be a tiebreaker anytime soon. More than showing whether or not masks work, the Cochrane Review finds that the kind of evidence gathered so far can’t really answer the question. Maybe that’s a good reason to let people decide for themselves."

So funny! The Cochrane Review’s authors explicitly found that wearing masks probably makes no difference, but Slate, using the study shell game, transformed that clear finding into a swamp of uncertainty: We’ll never know! It’s one of those unknowables, like what happens after death, or where the Universe came from.
In other words — it’s a religion. I think they gave it away when they mentioned the “effects of masks … on quality of life.” There are people who think masking somehow improves their quality of life, regardless of whether it stops covid infection or not. These are probably folks you should keep your kids away from.'

• Jeff Childers 'Coffee & Covid'