See the update at the bottom — more info thanks to people in comments.
Only the New York Times could pull off a left-hand-not-talking-to-the-right stunt like this. ICYMI (and you were lucky if you did), Stephens got a real clanger of an opinion piece in “the paper of record.”
Stephens seized upon a study looking into the effectiveness of masks in preventing the transmission of Covid.
The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous.
“There is just no evidence that they” — masks — “make any difference,” he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop.”
Stephens runs with this, that no masks of any kind, N-95, cotton, etc. did anything for anybody. With that for a launching pad, Stephens climbs on his hobby horse to tilt at some pet windmills.
To wit:
- The skeptics were right, and all the ‘experts’ should issue apologies for the terrible burdens and costs they placed on everybody.
- The same experts have learned nothing and would give the same advice again, so screw them.
- Technocrats and bureaucrats are not to be trusted; they have too much power which they use to silence dissent.
- Mask mandates were never going to work anyway — because constitution, human nature, culture, etc. etc.
- Masks were counter-productive because they gave a false sense of safety.
He finishes up with this gem:
There’s a final lesson. The last justification for masks is that, even if they proved to be ineffective, they seemed like a relatively low-cost, intuitively effective way of doing something against the virus in the early days of the pandemic. But “do something” is not science, and it shouldn’t have been public policy. And the people who had the courage to say as much deserved to be listened to, not treated with contempt. They may not ever get the apology they deserve, but vindication ought to be enough.
There’s one problem with all this. Stephens seized on this one study and this one author, and used it like a drunkard uses a lamppost — for support, not illumination. The comments are full of people who actually followed the link to the study, read it, and discovered that Stephens has seriously misconstrued the findings.
This is one of those meta-studies that agglomerates a number of studies carried out in different places under differing conditions to try to synthesize a conclusion, and the study has an important caveat right there in the conclusions.
To wit:
Authors' conclusions
The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions. There were additional RCTs during the pandemic related to physical interventions but a relative paucity given the importance of the question of masking and its relative effectiveness and the concomitant measures of mask adherence which would be highly relevant to the measurement of effectiveness, especially in the elderly and in young children.
emphasis added
What the authors are saying is that it’s difficult to draw hard conclusions about how effective masking is because the studies didn’t have enough data on how well people actually used the masks, whether they wore them properly, observed all of the other safety measures that go with mask wearing, and so on. They couldn't find hard proof that masks were effective — but they admit they didn’t have the data for high confidence in that conclusion.
Some more:
...Relatively low numbers of people followed the guidance about wearing masks or about hand hygiene, which may have affected the results of the studies…
...The observed lack of effect of mask wearing in interrupting the spread of influenza‐like illness (ILI) or influenza/COVID‐19 in our review has many potential reasons, including: poor study design; insufficiently powered studies arising from low viral circulation in some studies; lower adherence with mask wearing, especially amongst children; quality of the masks used; self‐contamination of the mask by hands; lack of protection from eye exposure from respiratory droplets (allowing a route of entry of respiratory viruses into the nose via the lacrimal duct); saturation of masks with saliva from extended use (promoting virus survival in proteinaceous material); and possible risk compensation behaviour leading to an exaggerated sense of security (Ammann 2022; Brosseau 2020; Byambasuren 2021; Canini 2010; Cassell 2006; Coroiu 2021; MacIntyre 2015; Rengasamy 2010; Zamora 2006).
...Several specific research gaps deserve expedited attention and may be highlighted within the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic. The use of face masks in the community setting represents one of the most pressing needs to address, given the polarised opinions around the world, and the increasing concerns over widespread microplastic pollution from the discarding of masks (Shen 2021).
emphasis added
Read the whole thing, and you begin to see that Stephens’ assertion that masks do nothing is not supported in the unquestionable manner he purports it to be. Many of the studies that were analyzed predate Covid — “78 randomized controlled trials, six of them during the Covid pandemic” — so if the issue is masks and Covid, there’s not as much data to call masks ineffective as might be supposed.
(Certainly the huge drop in influenza infections during the pandemic shows that something works — but Jefferson doesn't consider that sufficient proof apparently — and neither does Stephens.)
Down the Rabbit Hole
What seems to be the real issue that got Stephens’ knickers in a twist is to be found at the second link, an interview with the lead author of the study, Tom Jefferson MD by Maryanne Demasi PhD.
I’m guessing Stephens heard that a researcher had loudly trashed masks as totally useless, was disgusted by those who advocated masking without what he considered solid evidence, condemned experts who aren’t — in his opinion, and — at a basic level — sees tyranny by elites trampling on freedom with Covid as an excuse as a bigger problem than the pandemic. That worldview is right in Stephen’s wheelhouse given his conservative libertarian bent.
Linking to the paper first is bit of misdirection, as it does not back up his claims at all — the interview with Jefferson is where he’s really drawing them from. It’s fundamentally dishonest on Stephen’s part.
If he had cited Jefferson directly, asserting that the lead scientist on a research project had found masks did nothing and disagreed with findings in the paper as published, that might have been allowable. Instead he presents the report from the Cochrane Collaboration as though it completely backs up Jefferson — which it doesn’t.
In the interview Jefferson takes issue with caveats and qualifications Cochrane insisted on before allowing publication. Getting past scientific peer review is part of the process. (I’ve been there, done that.) That Jefferson doesn’t agree with the changes they insisted on is a matter of his opinion, however informed he considers it.
Jefferson attacks the way Covid measures were developed ad hoc in the face of the pandemic before there was sufficient evidence to fully justify them — in his opinion. These quotes gives an idea of where he is coming from:
DEMASI: But people say, I’m not wearing a mask for me, I’m wearing it for you.
JEFFERSON: I have never understood that difference. Have you?
DEMASI: They say it’s not to protect themselves, but to protect others, an act of altruism.
JEFFERSON: Ah yes. Wonderful. They get the Albert Schweitzer prize for Humanitarianism. Here’s what I think. Your overnight experts know nothing.
And, asserting that we don’t know enough about the way viruses are transmitted, he offers what he thinks should be done to find out.
JEFFERSON: It's probably related to the way that people behave, it could be the way viruses are transmitted or their port of entry, people don’t wear masks correctly….no-one really knows for sure. I keep saying it repeatedly, it needs to be looked at by doing a huge, randomised study – masks haven’t been given a proper trial. They should have been done, but they were not done. Instead, we have overnight experts perpetuating a ‘fear-demic.’
DEMASI: I’ve heard people say it would be unethical to do a study and randomise half of a group to masks and the other half to no masks….do you agree?
JEFFERSON: No, because we don't know what effect masks will have. If we don’t know what impact they have, how can it be unethical? Strident fanatics have managed to poison this whole discussion and try and make it into a black and white thing…and rely on terribly flawed studies.
Reminder: when the Covid pandemic first began to make itself known to the world, it was a novel virus that had not been seen in humans, it was spreading rapidly, and the death toll was horrendous. The kind of study Jefferson wanted before taking action would have left people and policy makers in limbo for months.
Maybe you remember the “Swiss cheese” graphic that showed how multiple forms of protection could cumulatively provide a higher level of protection from Covid than any single measure.
Jefferson rejects it.
DEMASI: Well, the ‘Swiss cheese’ model was one of the most influential explanations for why people should layer their protection. Another barrier, another layer of protection? You don’t like the Swiss cheese model?
JEFFERSON: I like Swiss cheese to eat -- the model not so much …It’s predicated on us knowing exactly how these respiratory viruses transmit, and that, I can tell you, we don't know. There isn't a single mode of transmission, it is probably mixed.
The idea that the covid virus is transmitted via aerosols has been repeated over and over as if its “truth” but the evidence is as thin as air. It’s complex and all journalists want 40 years of experience condensed into two sentences. You can quote the Swiss cheese model, but there’s no evidence that many of these things make any difference.
There are 11 other researchers who are listed as authors on the Cochrane meta study on which Jefferson was the lead author. Do none of them have any comments on what Jefferson is objecting to: the changes the review process added, the masking policies that were instituted, social distancing, lockdowns? It would be interesting to know if Stephens attempted to contact any of them. Jefferson looks like a bit of an outlier. (Or possibly “crank” is a better descriptor.)
Chochrane put out a report to respond to Jefferson’s objections. It spells out the reasons for taking action before all the evidence is in, before the answers have been locked down, while the science is still evolving. To quote in part:
...Resulting uncertainty in the evidence for public health measures has fed controversies regarding the legitimacy of public health policies involving these measures, with face masks being a special target for criticism.[4, 5]
For each measure, though, lack of evidence of effectiveness is not evidence that the interventions are ineffective. Rather, the details of these reviews show why there may never be strong evidence regarding the effectiveness of individual behavioural measures when deployed, often in combination, in a general population living in the complex, diverse circumstances of individuals' everyday lives. Waiting for strong evidence is a recipe for paralysis. Public health officials must, instead, take measured gambles, based on circumstantial evidence from the reviewed studies and other sources.[6] When protecting the public from harm is the objective, public health officials must act in a precautionary manner to take action even when evidence is uncertain (or not of the highest quality), particularly when the harms and costs of such action are likely limited.[7]..
emphasis added
The Rest of the Story — A Bit of Background
A couple of other points, and this is where it gets really interesting. The journalist interviewing Jefferson, Maryanne Demasi, PhD, is not without controversy in her own background. While she has done notable work that has gained her recognition, there have also been incidents where she has taken a contrarian point of view on some subjects not necessarily backed up as solidly as she would claim.
Demasi explains why Jefferson gave her an exclusive interview:
Jefferson doesn’t grant many interviews with journalists -- he doesn’t trust the media. But since we worked together at Cochrane a few years ago, he decided to let his guard down with me.
During our conversation, Jefferson didn’t hold back. He condemned the pandemic’s “overnight experts”, he criticised the multitude of scientifically baseless health policies, and even opened up about his disappointment in Cochrane’s handling of the review.
Her current position at the Brownstone Institute is perhaps better understood in light of the institute’s priorities — which may be why Jefferson felt more comfortable speaking to her.
...The motive force of Brownstone Institute was the global crisis created by policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. That trauma revealed a fundamental misunderstanding alive in all countries around the world today, a willingness on the part of the public and officials to relinquish freedom and fundamental human rights in the name of managing a public health crisis, which was not managed well in most countries. The consequences were devastating and will live in infamy.
The policy response was a failed experiment in full social and economic control in most nations. And yet the lockdowns are also widely considered a template of what is possible.
OUR MISSION
The mission of the Brownstone Institute is constructively to come to terms with what happened, understand why, discover and explain alternative paths, and seek reforms to prevent such events from happening again. Lockdowns and mandates have set a precedent in the modern world; without accountability, social and economic institutions will be shattered once again.
Brownstone Institute plays an essential role in preventing a recurrence by holding decision makers, media elites, technology companies, and intellectuals accountable. This is especially true given the ubiquity of tech censorship. In addition, the Brownstone Institute hopes to shed light on a path to recovery from the devastating collateral damage, while providing a vision for a different way to think about freedom, security, and public life.
Looking at who’s who at the Brownstone Institute, much becomes clear starting at the top:
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
Tucker’s wikipedia entry is a bit more revealing:
Jeffrey Albert Tucker (/ˈtʌkər/; born December 19, 1963) is an American libertarian writer, publisher, entrepreneur and advocate of anarcho-capitalism and Bitcoin.
For many years he worked for Ron Paul, the Mises Institute, and Lew Rockwell. With the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) he organized efforts against COVID-19 restrictions starting in 2020, and he founded the Brownstone Institute think tank in 2021 to continue such efforts.
As of 2021, he is Chief Liberty Officer (CLO) of Liberty.me.[1] He is an adjunct scholar with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy,[2] a research affiliate of RMIT University's Blockchain Innovation Hub,[3] and an Acton Institute associate.[4]
The Epoch Times:
The Epoch Times is a far-right[1]international multi-language newspaper and media company affiliated with the Falun Gong new religious movement.[29]The newspaper, based in New York City, is part of the Epoch Media Group, which also operates New Tang Dynasty (NTD) Television.[30] The Epoch Times has websites in 35 countries but is blocked in mainland China.[31]
The Epoch Times opposes the Chinese Communist Party,[32][33][22] promotes far-right politicians in Europe,[8][10][22] and has supported former President Donald Trump in the U.S.;[34][35] a 2019 report by NBC News showed it to be the second-largest funder of pro-Trump Facebook advertising after the Trump campaign.[30][36][22] The Epoch Times frequently promotes other Falun Gong-affiliated groups, such as the performing arts company Shen Yun.[34][24][37] The Epoch Media Group's news sites and YouTube channels have spread misinformation and conspiracy theories, such as QAnon and anti-vaccine misinformation,[34][40] and false claims of fraud in the 2020 United States presidential election.[43]
Nice people Bret Stephens relies on to inform his understanding of the world, right? For an opinion columnist working at a major mainstream media outlet, Stephens seems to be a bit more crazy-adjacent than might first be presumed.
Much is explained — but not excused. As an avowed libertarian, the opinions and actions of Stephens makes several joking definitions of libertarianism seem a bit more trenchant. To wit: Libertarianism is anarchy for rich people. Libertarianism is an anti-social disease.
Meanwhile...
However it works, Stephens found in Jefferson what he wanted to find, on masks, and on government in general, cherry-picking to make his points.
That’s what makes a subscriber-only newsletter also appearing at The NY Times by David Wallace-Wells all the more discordant. He asks:
Whatever happened to our Roaring Twenties? In the first year of the pandemic, it was common to hear predictions that however brutal and harrowing the near future seemed, the world would find itself, at some point, celebrating the end of Covid-19 — perhaps in a grand bacchanal to recall the dizzying decade that followed the Spanish flu of 1918 and 1919, which killed 675,000 Americans.
But that end never really came, not definitively. That the pandemic is no longer seen as an emergency is obvious; just look outside. But the country didn’t turn the page so much as limp forward, through a fog of exhaustion and loneliness and long Covid, into the dawn of a new period in which the coronavirus has retreated for most as an everyday threat but may well continue as gothic background noise, killing tens of thousands of Americans each year.
A true postpandemic period may still arrive, perhaps even a real Roaring Twenties. But in recent weeks, as researchers have registered one after another mammalian outbreak of the avian influenza H5N1, or bird flu, another possibility has loomed into view: back-to-back pandemics — a new one potentially driven by a disease that over the past several decades has killed about half the humans with known infections.
Wallace-Wells goes on to look at things that do not bode well.
- He warns that lessons from Covid have not been learned; the advent of Bird Flu jumping to humans would find the U.S. unprepared.
- We don’t have a working disease surveillance network that could provide early warning of the next pandemic.
- Money for active measures like air filtration systems, better lab safety, vaccine development, etc. have not been spent or have not been funded.
- The public trust in authorities to provide guidance and foster compliance is in tatters.
- We’ve gone from panic to exhaustion, and too many healthcare workers are burned out.
- We may be entering the “pandemicine epoch” where new pandemics occur more and more frequently.
I would suggest to Wallace-Wells, that if he wants to go a little more deeply into why those problems are with us, he might look a little closer to home. Bret Stephens’ column is going to be cited by every anti-vaxxer, every mask mandate objector, every lockdown opponent, everyone who wants Fauci put on trial and have him executed. Everyone who is more terrified of government than a deadly disease pandemic.
If and when the next pandemic arrives, they will be actively opposing everything they think infringes on their freedom, and Stephens will have helped ‘prove’ their opposition is justified. The bird flu Wallace-Wells is concerned about could possibly be even more lethal than Covid — in which case the obstructionism and denialism Stephens is promoting is going to amplify the carnage if it is the next pandemic.
To reference an old horror movie trope for Wallace-Wells:
The call is coming from inside the house! Get out!
As long at Bret Stephens continues to hold forth at The NY Times, the paper of record is going to be part of the problem, not the solution.
In so many ways...
UPDATE:
Thanks to several people in comments who pointed to more on this:
Kevin Drum has the short take — Are Masks Useless? The conclusion:
...Overall, this report didn't change my priors much: masks are a good-but-not-great intervention that helps limit the spread of COVID. They are mostly helpful (a) in crowded indoor settings and (b) when used properly. Cloth masks, as near as I can tell, are all but useless. However, surgical masks—especially N95 masks—are helpful. The greater the percentage of people who wear them, the more helpful they become.
A summary of masking studies specifically for COVID is maintained by the CDC here. The results vary, and don't generally show huge benefits from wearing masks, but they do mostly show benefits.
Kelsey Piper at VOX has a discussion of the Cochrane review that gets into more detail.
The new scientific review on masks and Covid isn’t what you think
A meta-analysis seeks to be the last word on the effectiveness of masks, but finding answers in science isn’t that easy.
Several excerpts:
...Nearly all of us wore masks at one time or another, and many of us still do. Did that even help?
It doesn’t seem like it, according to the Cochrane review: “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.”
Some observers have taken this as a final, authoritative conclusion on the matter, an opinion shared by the man behind the review. “There is just no evidence that they make any difference. Full stop,” Tom Jefferson, the study’s lead author, said in an interview. Even fitted N95 masks in health care settings, the interviewer asked? “It makes no difference — none of it.”
This in particular:
I think Jefferson — an Oxford University epidemiologist who has a number of eccentric and flatly nonsensical opinions about Covid-19, including that it didn’t originate in China and may have been circulating in Europe for years before its global emergence — is overstating his case. There is something we can learn from the Cochrane paper, but it’s as much about the process of science as it is about the effectiveness of masks.
emphasis added
Piper discusses the Cochrane paper in question and lays out the problems with trying to answer a complicated question with a study like this. The conclusion:
...The big problem is the sheer scope of the question: not “does masking reduce Covid transmission during a pandemic?” but “does masking help against all respiratory illness across contexts?” Because of the questions it chooses to consider and the ways it chooses to aggregate its evidence, it has arrived at a mask-skeptical conclusion with limited applicability to the hot-button question we all care about: whether there’s evidence for masking during high-transmission periods in the Covid-19 pandemic.
We want science to be objective and impartial, for scientists to get the same answers regardless of their starting worldviews. On some questions, like the efficacy of antibiotics against bacterial infections, the evidence really is overwhelming. But on some, like masks, it’s limited.
And I do think the government bears some responsibility for poor communication about masks: this is an intervention where evidence is limited and suggestive, not a sure thing. But I’m also frustrated by the way this quite bad meta-analysis has been seized on as proof that masks don’t work.
How you interpret limited evidence depends substantially on where you start. A meta-analysis is a useful tool, but the results it gets will be substantially informed by how the question is posed and which research is included in answering it. There often aren’t easy answers even to seemingly easy questions, and there sometimes aren’t any answers — even to questions that we care about deeply and that have been studied in some depth.
emphasis added
Debunk the Funk with Dr. Wilson is a video discussion of the Cochrane paper that also looks at how difficult is is to answer the question about how effective masks are, how anti-maskers have seized on the parts they like about the report but skip over the parts they don’t, and a look at what masks actually do.
From Dr. Wilson, the point of masks is not so much that they offer personal protection (although they do provide some.) Their more important function in the way they work is to cut down transmission of viral particles, protecting other people. (This is what Dr. Jefferson dismisses as ”the Albert Schweitzer prize for Humanitarianism” — protecting other people.)
BOTTOM LINE:
Bret Stephens seized on the ‘facts’ from a dubious source that fit his beliefs, disregarded those that contradict his beliefs, and used his position at The NY Times to spread dangerous disinformation.
In effect he not only drank from a poisoned well, he used water from that well to mix the anti-mask mandate Koolaid he’s handing out.
