Masks: When The Absence Of Evidence Is So Overwhelming That You Have To Conclude It Almost Certainly Means Evidence Of Absence

I quoted only a few days ago the saying ‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’, in relation to the possibility that wind farm construction was causing the deaths of whales in the north east USA.

'Clean Energy' - Saving The Planet By Killing Birds, Bats And Whales

In that case, researchers had failed to really look for the evidence. That’s important, I’m sure you will agree. The absence of evidence in such a situation comes down to the fact that the ‘experts’ can’t really be arsed to look for it! Sounds familiar. But, if you have exhaustively looked for the evidence of an effect over a number of years, by examining ‘gold standard’ randomized control trials as well as numerous observational studies, and you still fail to find the evidence you’re looking for, then it becomes more and more likely that it is absent on account of the fact that it doesn’t exist!

This is the case with masks. The latest update to the Cochrane Review once again finds no convincing evidence that surgical masks or N95 respirators have any significant effect upon transmission and infection rates of respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2. Maryanne Demasi has interviewed the lead author Tom Jefferson, and what he has to say is very revealing:

EXCLUSIVE: Lead author of new Cochrane review speaks out

DEMASI: This Cochrane review has caused quite a stir on social media and inflamed the great mask debate. What are your thoughts?

JEFFERSON: Well, it’s an update from our November 2020 review and the evidence really didn't change from 2020 to 2023. There’s still no evidence that masks are effective during a pandemic.

JEFFERSON: In early 2020, when the pandemic was ramping up, we had just updated our Cochrane review ready to publish…but Cochrane held it up for 7 months before it was finally published in November 2020. Those 7 months were crucial. During that time, it was when policy about masks was being formed.  Our review was important, and it should have been out there. 

DEMASI: What do you mean by “the right answer”?  Are you suggesting that Cochrane was pro-mask, and that your review contradicted the narrative. Is that your intuition?

JEFFERSON: Yes, I think that is what was going on. After the 7-month delay, Cochrane then published an editorial to accompany our review.  The main message of that editorial was that you can't sit on your hands, you’ve got to do something, you can't wait for good evidence…. it's a complete subversion of the ‘precautionary principle’ which states that you should do nothing unless you have reasonable evidence that benefits outweigh the harms.

DEMASI: Why would Cochrane do that?

JEFFERSON: I think the purpose of the editorial was to undermine our work.

DEMASI: Do you think Cochrane was playing a political game?

JEFFERSON: That I cannot say, but it was 7 months that just happened to coincide with the time when all the craziness began, when academics and politicians started jumping up and down about masks. We call them “strident campaigners”.  They are activists, not scientists.

So, Cochrane itself held up the publication of the initial review by 7 months, which was eventually published in November 2020, after the imposition of the many mask mandates in various countries. How convenient. Jefferson calls the academics responsible for the imposition of mask wearing ‘guidelines’ and mandates activists, not scientists. Couldn’t agree more. Exactly the same pertains to the field of climate science. A huge number of climate ‘scientists’ are in fact political activists who use (abuse) science in order to further their agenda or to please their paymasters.

JEFFERSON: There is just no evidence that they make any difference. Full stop. My job, our job as a review team, was to look at the evidence, we have done that. Not just for masks. We looked at hand washing, sterilisation, goggles etcetera…

The interviewer then asks Jefferson the following:

DEMASI: May I just ask a finer point on masks… it's not that masks don’t work, it’s just that there is no evidence they do work…is that right?

JEFFERSON: There's no evidence that they do work, that’s right. It’s possible they could work in some settings….we’d know if we’d done trials. All you needed was for Tedros [from WHO] to declare it’s a pandemic and they could have randomised half of the United Kingdom, or half of Italy, to masks and the other half to no masks. But they didn’t. Instead, they ran around like headless chickens.

So even Jefferson, after painstakingly reviewing numerous observational studies and randomised control trials on the efficacy of masks over three years, still concludes that, because none of them demonstrated any significant effect, this does not necessarily mean that there might be an effect in certain settings. He suggests a huge, population-wide RCT. I suggest that would probably give exactly the same result as the smaller trials, but it would at long last finally debunk the myth that flimsy masks can control transmission of a respiratory virus. This population-wide RCT might have been a reasonable proposition at the height of the panic-demic, but I can’t see half the populace of any western country now willingly taking part in a mass mask-wearing exercise (thank God). Many Asian countries (e.g. China, Japan) are still clinging to the use of masks and they reportedly still have high infection rates.

But even if by some miracle it was shown that masks have a significant population-wide effect on transmission of a virus, it would still need to be demonstrated that the benefits outweigh the significant harms - physical, psychological, social and environmental. Not going to happen. It’s time to ditch the face nappies forever.