At the very beginning of the pandemic, the official view, based on the science of the time, was that masks had no value outside health care settings…
This work informed the starting position of the World Health Organization and many public health leaders with experience in the field. Scepticism about the value of masks was not misinformation at that time. However, this was reversed for reasons that have yet to be fully understood…
A further updated [Cochrane] Review has just been published, after a lengthy peer review and editorial process. The 2023 update includes the results of 12 trials, now covering 276,917 participants. The quality of evidence has been upgraded from low to moderate and the authors now conclude that there is ‘probably little to no benefit’ from cloth or surgical face masks in the community. They also considered RCTs comparing cloth or surgical masks with N95/P2 masks. The evidence here was weaker but suggested that these made little or no difference to transmission…