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.