Oh no, they bowed to people whose livelihoods depend on staying healthy and realized that masks actually do help when everyone wears them.
Could I get a citation for this please? Just about every source I've seen has since admitted that masks did absolutely nothing for the purposes for which they were advised to be used.
> 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).
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/yes-masks-reduce-risk-spre...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/opinion/masks-work-cochra...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/16/cochrane-...
At least, unlike the other person in this thread, you didn't do the gaslighty thing of acting like 'we all know' masks don't work.
The Cochrane review was not incorrect; it was not retracted. The "apology from Cochrane" was not about the paper itself, and they didn't say that the conclusions were wrong. The NY Times and the Washington Post and Gavi are just wrong, and they're lying. Full stop. By literally the same standards of evidence they are using ("the lower bound of the confidence interval crosses 1.0, so we can't exclude the possibility of benefit"), Ivermectin and HCQ "work" against Covid. So you either accept both claims, or you reject both.
We have two political teams, each advancing separate-but-equal forms of pseudo-sciencey twaddle, and neither side is willing to admit that the actual data doesn't back their opinions:
Similarly, I don't know anyone who has died from wearing a mask.
This is not even to mention the numerous other studies, experiments, and demsonstartsions of all sorts of respiratory protective gear that show effectiveness against particulates smaller even than COVID-19.
Quite literally, the evidence for both is equally good (or bad). Citing mechanistic or laboratory studies is absurd, when we have actual RCTs.
The intensity of the push for masking was not at all matched by the effectiveness of masking. From most people's perspectives, if the rate of infection with masking is 90% the rate with no masking then masking doesn't work in layperson's terms.