Despite the obviously charged assertion the authors make, I believe this is a good topic to discuss now that the weight of the pandemic is complete. You don't change emergency management plans in the middle of an emergency. We can and should question our approaches, extracting global principles that can be used next time this happens. Similar topics we should rigorously evaluate include FDA and CDC policies, but those are outside scope of the article.

I respect the authors' asking the question, but think their narrative is a bit weak / not tied down sufficiently to make a strong claim based solely on literature review.

For example: they raise the question of increases in stillborn births and then cite a 3X increase in stillbirths among studied women versus the population rate. Without additional facts, that looks potentially damning to mask wearing during a pandemic driven by a respiratory virus. What is less clear is how the accounting for observed versus actual is performed. Similar to crime statistics, the count of incidence is biased by several positive and negative factors, and stillbirths are not always captured. What _was_ observed was a significant increase in stillbirths due to COVID-19 (especially the Delta variant, which to be fair the authors mention).