"Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that 'masks don't work', which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation."
https://www.cochrane.org/news/statement-physical-interventio...
https://www.cochrane.org/news/statement-physical-interventio...
... which is what I just said: some people got mad at them because their review found no reliable evidence that masking worked (or rather, that mask mandates worked, but these are virtually the same thing).
The null hypothesis for any medical intervention is that it has no effect. You start from that and then try to prove your hypothesis that it does have an effect, which is what medical studies are for. If you can't prove something works then we fall back to the null and assume it doesn't. So that isn't a misleading or inaccurate interpretation of the results, though it would certainly have been politically convenient for the Cochrane organization if their reviewers could have supported the claims of public health authorities.
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.
Which I think is definitive.
No it's not the same thing, and that's the key point. If you tell people that masking doesn't work (which is false) then of course mask mandates won't work because adherence will be low. A self-fulfilling prophecy really.
Also health authorities told people masks were highly effective. That's what justified the mandates. So you can't argue mask mandates didn't work because people were told it wouldn't work.
Therefore there's no self fulfilling prophecy here. It didn't even matter what individuals thought anyway, we all had to wear masks.
Although Cochrane much prefers to use RCTs, people have run regressions over the data and there was no link between levels of mask wearing and infection rates. It sucks but it appears that masks just can't stop aerosolized virus, which spreads like a gas. They aren't designed to do that so it's no knock against the manufacturers, who in some cases explicitly warned people that their products would be useless for that purpose (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EfNmzptXkAEg9Od?format=jpg&name=...).
This is not virtually the same thing. Comparing those two is wildly disingenuous and you know it.