Comment The claims are between weak and unsupported (Score 1) 501
A Harvard professor on the history of science looks at our response to the pandemic, criticizing "a report that gave the false impression that masking didn't help." From Scientific American:
The group's report was published by Cochrane, an organization that collects databases and periodically issues "systematic" reviews of scientific evidence relevant to health care.
No idea why systematic needed to be rendered in scare quotes here, but for context, Cochrane is a highly-presitigous and cautious journal whose reviews essentially settle outstanding questions in the field.
Naomi Oreskes is a historian with some background in geology. You can see her conributions to Scientific American here. Her contributions cover the gamut of things like bullying, child labor laws, gun violence, et al.
This year it published a paper addressing the efficacy of physical interventions to slow the spread of respiratory illness such as COVID... The review of studies of masking concluded that the "results were inconclusive..." [and] it was "uncertain whether wearing [surgical] masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses." Still, the authors were also uncertain about that uncertainty, stating that their confidence in their conclusion was "low to moderate." You can see why the average person could be confused... The Cochrane finding was not that masking didn't work but that scientists lacked sufficient evidence of sufficient quality to conclude that they worked... Cochrane has made this mistake before. In 2016 a flurry of media reports declared that flossing your teeth was a waste of time...
Stating a summation of evidence you don't like is not a mistake.
The answer demonstrates a third issue with the Cochrane approach: how it defines evidence. The organization states that its reviews "identify, appraise and synthesize all the empirical evidence that meets pre-specified eligibility criteria." The problem is what those eligibility criteria are. Cochrane Reviews base their findings on randomized controlled trials (RCTs), often called the "gold standard" of scientific evidence. But many questions can't be answered well with RCTs, and some can't be answered at all...
Masking is not one of those things. You can mask some people and not other people and measure the difference, and you can do with a randomly selected sudy and control groups. An RCT is basically always better when it is possible to do and the only way to establish causality. If your opening argument is "who really cares about RCT evidence anyway" it's already pretty obvious what your feeling is about any well-established evidence that undermines your stance in general.
In fact, there is strong evidence that masks do work to prevent the spread of respiratory illness. It just doesn't come from RCTs. It comes from Kansas. In July 2020 the governor of Kansas issued an executive order requiring masks in public places. Just a few weeks earlier, however, the legislature had passed a bill authorizing counties to opt out of any statewide provision. In the months that followed, COVID rates decreased in all 24 counties with mask mandates and continued to increase in 81 other counties that opted out of them... Cochrane ignored this epidemiological evidence because it didn't meet its rigid standard.
The pandemic raged over the entire world for years and there are countless instances of varying country, state, city, and school policies, how is the key evidence indisputably proving her position two datapoints occurring over a month-and-a-half in Kansas?
The truth the referenced study was a badly reported study which measured the masked countries from after they had just recovered from a COVID spike. Even then the result was only a 6% relative reduction in COVID. Not only that the group of masked counties had a consistently higher amount of covid throughout the entire study.
The fact that some methodologies can be flawed is exactly why you would prefer a careful systematic review of studies over citing a single study that confirms your priors.
Also note the journal that is published in, MMWR, is not peer-reviewed in the sense of other journals - research there is selected according to policy preferences. There are some problems with that.
I have called this approach "methodological fetishism," when scientists fixate on a preferred methodology and dismiss studies that don't follow it. Sadly, it's not unique to Cochrane. By dogmatically insisting on a particular definition of rigor, scientists in the past have landed on wrong answers more than once.
So according to Naomi Oreskes actual rigor is when you reject large and careful metanalyses of all available data by experts in the field and statistical analysis and instead is to pick one study out of 80 that confirms her biases by cooking endpoints?
She is a complete embarrassment and if SA had any integrity they would retract this article and fire her. As well as their present editor Laura Lee Helmuth who is largely responsible for driving SA's quality into the ground and prioritizing politicization over science.
Vox also points out that while Cochrane's review included 78 studies, "only six were actually conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic... Instead, most of them looked at flu transmission in normal conditions, and many of them were about other interventions like hand-washing.
"Only two of the studies are about Covid and masking in particular. Furthermore, neither of those studies looked directly at whether people wear masks, but instead at whether people were encouraged or told to wear masks by researchers."
Does Vox not understand what a systematic review is? They looked at the available evidence. Cochrane had no control over what the available evidence was.
And the title of the review is "Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses". Yes, there are other types of physical intervention than masking, and other types of respiratory viruses than CoVID-19. How is the fact they looked at more evidence a critique of the analysis? How you can be so incompetent that your 'rebuttal' can't even comprehend the title of the paper?