The blogger Eugyppius writes:

The Cochrane mask review I wrote about last week has hit Team Mask very hard, in fact much harder than I thought it would. They’ve been frantically coping for days now – combing through the fine print, seizing upon every moment of expressed uncertainty or caution in the paper to claim that population-wide masking might still be justified, somehow, because reasons.

[…]

Plainly, the conviction that mask mandates were necessary came first; The Science followed. All the while, though, the evidence didn’t go away. It was just suspended slightly out of view, diluted with weak excuses and deprived of influence over policy, until the ideological fervour dissipated and the plain truth could be spoken again. The lesson is that regime authorities, particularly when they enjoy the collaboration of the press and academia, can tell almost any lie, but suppressing the truth requires active effort, and sooner or later their myths come crashing down. The mask mythology was among the first to take shape, and it has been the first to fall.

In the coming months other pandemic fantasies will also begin unravel.

Update (08/02/2023):

Tom Woods writes:

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.