Commentary from Tom Woods

'The maskers just took a beating.
I'll bet you're like me: you see someone wearing a mask in 2023, and you wonder what on Earth the person could be thinking.

Either the person hasn't paid attention to anything at all, or is trying to make some kind of warped statement.

It shouldn't have been all that hard to figure out that they don't seem to do anything.

All you have to do is look around the world. There is no connection between masking and any health outcome at all.

If masking were really so important, we should be able to tell, based on each country's charts, roughly where universal masking came into effect. And yet, as I showed for Europe in my Covid quiz in 2021, the various charts are completely random, and it is impossible in any one of them to detect at what point the introduction of mask mandates occurred.

Well, the Cochrane Library just released a study on masking that really puts the nail in the coffin.
The Cochrane Library describes itself as "a collection of databases in medicine and other healthcare specialties provided by Cochrane and other organizations. At its core is the collection of Cochrane Reviews, a database of systematic reviews and meta-analyses which summarize and interpret the results of medical research."

It is highly respected, and is known for its serious research methods.

The crazies are hysterical about it. But they can't refute it.

Vinay Prasad, a political liberal who has been honest during Covid, puts it like this: "It is irrational to mask."

Prasad sums it up: "Here is the big summary finding. With 276,000 participants in RCTs or cluster RCTs, masking does nothing. No reduction in influenza-like or Covid-like illness and no reduction in confirmed flu or COVID. That’s stone-cold negative. See those effect sizes and confidence intervals."
(To read the study yourself, do a search for "Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses," from 2023.)

This includes the ballyhooed N95 mask as well.

Everybody in the medical establishment knew masking didn't do anything, Prasad says:

There was a reason why Tony Fauci went out initially and said it didn't work. There was a reason why the CDC said not to do it and the WHO said not to do it. And between March 1st and April 15th of 2020, there ain't no new evidence that was generated of any plausibility. But two things happened.

There was a concerted movement by activists who don't know evidence-based medicine to hashtag #wearaclothmask and hashtag #savelives and...you know, making stupid TikTok videos.
Why? Because they're scared. They're in their house, they're scared. They don't know what to do. They just grasp for anything, just like our primitive ancestors would have maybe slaughtered a chicken or done a rain dance. They're doing the same thing....

They saw that Donald Trump didn't do it. And the moment he didn't do it, they knew they were right, because if he didn't do it, I got to be right on it. It's got to be right if he doesn't do it, because he always does the wrong thing.

That was truly how juvenile the universal masking movement was.

Actually, that's the wrong word. It was frankly sinister.

As with "social distancing," you were accused of essentially being a murderer if you didn't go along. It didn't matter that a scatterplot of places in the US showed no connection between Covid restrictions and health outcomes.
This was never about science or evidence. It was a sinister confluence of some people's irrational fear with other people's desire to control, shame, and isolate.'