Why Population-Wide Masking Was a Fool’s Errand, and What We Can Learn From the Experiment

In spite of the wave of enthusiasm for community masking among public health elites and governments across the Western world, and repeated assurances by public health authorities like WHO, Fauci and the CDC that masks were critical for combating the spread of Covid-19, over two years of population-wide mask mandates across a large swathe of the Western world have not produced better disease outcomes, when compared with largely unmasked regions like Florida and Sweden, and have not been validated by any high quality evidence of efficacy.

This was not especially surprising. Only a population of robots could wear masks perfectly and in all relevant scenarios of viral transmission. We didn’t need 78 randomised controlled trials to realise that population-wide masking was a fool’s errand fron the start. Consider the following impediments to effective community masking:

1. First, medical masks, even when used correctly, provide imperfect protection, at best, against viral transmission, since the aerosols that transmit SARS-CoV-2 are sufficiently small that they can exit through the pores of a mask or leak around its sides.

2. Second, whatever about medical personnel in a clinical setting, it is unrealistic to expect the general population to strictly adhere to rigorous mask protocols while going about their ordinary life. People easily forget to change their masks, they don’t know how to correctly fit them to their face, or they fiddle with them, increasing the risk of contamination.

3. Third, masks are quite uncomfortable, especially when worn tightly for prolonged periods of time, so people develop strategies to relieve their breathing, like exposing their noses or ordering food on a flight.

4. Fourth, one of the main ways people socialise is by eating and drinking, which is obviously inconsistent with mask-wearing. The futility of masking in everyday social settings is amply illustrated by the image of a masked person walking across a restaurant, taking their seat, and then removing their mask in order to eat.

5. Fifth, many social gatherings occur in households: when is the last time someone invited you over for a cuppa and insisted you wear an N95 mask while the kettle is boiling?

6. Sixth, children in school are unlikely to adhere correctly to masking guidelines while interacting with each other or playing in the school yard.

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The virtual impossibility of adhering consistently to universal masking requirements while living a human life already gives us a clue that universal masking is unlikely to work as a strategy for curbing an infectious disease, whether the flu or Covid-19. And the evidence has borne this out. The latest mask evidence review by Cochrane, a respected international institute that collates and synthesises evidence related to health, echoes previous reviews by WHO, ECDC, and Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, which all found a high level of uncertainty about the efficacy of masking.

The updated Cochrane review, published on January 30th 2023, concluded that “the pooled results” of 12 RCTs (Randomised Controlled Trials) “did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks.”

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This finding, which is consistent with the findings of other prominent mask meta-studies, only serves to remind us that anyone who continues to believe in masking the general population to block viral transmission is essentially making an act of faith, much as one might throw muck at a wall and hope to God that some of it will stick.

And that is no way to ground a sensible response to an epidemic. Shots in the dark are ineffective strategies for dealing with a public health threat, and where they predictably inflict collateral harms, they are downright reckless. This particular shot in the dark create unintended consequences such as bringing public authorities into disrepute and inflicting needless collateral harms like psychological and physical discomfort, public resentment, and useless confrontations between citizens and public and private authorities.

But our governments - whether intentionally or through blind trust in the misguided advice of “experts” - opted to ignore the science and just roll out mask mandates willy-nilly for the entire population. This momentous experiment made life quite unpleasant for a lot of people, and inflicted many collateral harms that have not been properly acknowledged, such as cognitive impairment and communication deficits caused by the concealment of people’s faces, and a lot of psychological distress for those who where harassed every time they went into a supermarket if they lowered their mask to catch a breath or just refused to participate in the experiment.

Now that the experiment has been paused in most countries, it’s a good time to take stock and see if we can draw some instructive lessons for the future. Here are four lessons I have drawn from this misbegotten experiment:

1. Pro-masking health authorities no longer deserve to be trusted, period.

   Institutions and authorities that pride themselves on basing their recommendations on “the science,” have succumbed to political pressures to advocate masking and give the public false assurances about the efficacy of masking (the head of the CDC, for example, is still recommending masking during outbreaks in spite of a dearth of evidence supporting them). The degree to which the public health establishment, both at the national and global level, has become politicised and ideologised means it cannot be trusted to make sound recommendations should another public health “emergency” or epidemic come along. We must independently corroborate any and all advice coming out of these organisations, rather than naively assuming, as many of us did before, that they are conscientious, public-spirited and scientifically informed.

2. Citizens must be more pro-active about seeking out reliable health information.

   As a direct correlate of our loss of trust in public health authorities, citizens must educate themselves and be more discerning about where they get their health advice from, not only during a pandemic, but also during “normal” times. We now know that national governments and international bodies like WHO and the European Commission are among the leading purveyors of medical misinformation, whether on masks or in relation to their decision to push universal vaccination, knowing full well that young and healthy people were at far, far lower risk from Covid-19 and many of them had already acquired natural immunity by the time Covid vaccines were “offered” to them (“offer” being a euphemism, given the steep penalties attached to refusal).

3. Heavy reliance on coercion in health policy is both inhumane and counterproductive.

   The rapid shift from masking advice to mask mandates was symptomatic of a shift in thinking among public health policy gurus and among governments: the traditional model of voluntary collaboration with citizens to promote and protect their health had been jettisoned in favour of a top-down, “do-as-your-told-or-else” approach. This approach alienated a significant number of citizens from public authorities and sowed the seeds of distrust toward public authorities. It created a highly confrontational atmosphere and undoubtedly worsed the mental health of citizens who found themselves coerced into behaviours they did not see the point of, such as masking while walking to their table in a restaurant, or masking on an airplane and then unmasking during meals.

4. Citizens must learn to be more rebellious in the face of absurd and tyrannical directives.

   Mask mandates would never have worked if a large portion of the population, businesses, schools and universities had simply ignored them. When governments use bully-boy tactics to enforce compliance with a health directive, this is already suspect on its face. When the rule they are enforcing flies in the face of citizens’ common sense, it deserves to be ridiculed and laughed out of town. In the Spanish city of Pamplona, where I live, police were actually reprimanding people in bars for not wearing masks between sips of beer. I know this through first-hand testimony. This sort of absurd, dehumanising and infantilising requirement brings civil authorities into disrepute and is a brazen insult to citizens’ intelligence. As such, it deserves to be openly disobeyed. If enough people disobey, the rule becomes irrelevant and un-enforceable.

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1. The authors assessed 78 RCTs regarding physical measures including masking and hand-washing. They assessed 12 trials “comparing medical/surgical masks versus no masks to prevent the spread of viral respiratory illness (two trials with healthcare workers and 10 in the community).” This is what they found: “Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza-like illness (ILI)/COVID-19 like illness compared to not wearing masks (risk ratio (RR) 0.95, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.84 to 1.09; 9 trials, 276,917 participants; moderate-certainty evidence. Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory-confirmed influenza/SARS-CoV-2 compared to not wearing masks (RR 1.01, 95% CI 0.72 to 1.42; 6 trials, 13,919 participants; moderate-certainty evidence). Harms were rarely measured and poorly reported (very low-certainty evidence).”