The Great Mask Debate is limping towards closure. While there is no single conclusive piece of evidence, the best research points towards there being little or no general benefit from the mass use of masks in the community. It is even doubtful whether there is much value from requiring masks in health care settings or… Read More »
This post is co-authored with Dr Colin Axon, Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering, Brunel University London, UK. Whenever new evidence is produced demonstrating the ineffectiveness of masks, whether cloth, surgical, or N95/FP2, in preventing community transmission of Covid and other respiratory viruses, a commentator can be guaranteed to claim that different standards of evaluation should… Read More »
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… Read More »
…it would be nice to think that the biomedical and public health elites in the UK and North America thought in a more nuanced way about the “Orient”, not least because of the wide influence of Edward Said’s critique of such thinking. We should, however, be used to disappointment when it comes to pandemic measures.… Read More »
Another day, another report revealing the damage from COVID policies to children and their development. A BBC study has found a 10 percent increase in the number of 5- and 6-year-olds in England requiring specialist speech and language support in the last year. This is the group whose pre-school experiences were most disrupted by pandemic… Read More »
Inspector Gregory: Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention? Holmes: To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. Inspector Gregory: The dog did nothing in the night-time. Holmes: That was the curious incident. The Adventure of Silver Blaze (1892) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle …The lack… Read More »
… The state of the face mask debate is rather as if Galileo had published his account of the heliocentric universe and then included a paragraph at the end telling the reader to ignore all the evidence because the Church had declared that everything revolved around the Earth. In the absence of better-quality work –… Read More »
A troubling turn in the public policy management of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the increasing tendency to justify interventions by assertions of scientific truth that bely the uncertainty of the evidence on which they are based. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more obvious than in the case of mandatory face masks in community settings… Nothing… Read More »