PETER HITCHENS: If masks are pointless, will I get an apology?
The research is in. Wearing bits of cloth over your mouth and nose is almost certainly pointless, unless you are a bank robber trying to hide his identity.
The news comes from a Cochrane Review, one of the most reliable and thorough forms of scientific research.
The review, which focused on masks and hand-washing, looked at evidence from 78 randomised trials with more than 610,000 participants.
It found that wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to influenza-like or Covid-19-like illness transmission.
This is no great surprise. Before the great panic plunged the world into isolation, house arrest and inflation three years ago, the expert view was that face-coverings were of little help in protecting against the spread of viruses.
The research is in. It found that wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to influenza-like or Covid-19-like illness transmissio
Government documents of the time said so, as did the World Health Organisation (WHO). A BBC medical reporter found that the WHO later reversed its view on the subject for political and not medical reasons.
Somebody somewhere thought that mass mask-wearing, enforced by law, would help maintain an atmosphere of permanent worry and conformism.
In September 2020, Australian police in Melbourne were photographed placing cloth strips over the faces of arrested, handcuffed demonstrators, as if to emphasise the repressive nature of the measure.
As a document from the Government’s own Sage advisory body said on March 22, 2020: ‘A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened.’
It added: ‘The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.’
Well, that was then. There was plenty of evidence that this was all mistaken at the time, which I tried to bring to my readers. But others, including The Mail on Sunday’s
Dr Ellie Cannon, honestly believed that mask-wearing was a good thing. And this paper quite rightly gave a platform to both views.
But the Cochrane Review is so powerful that Dr Cannon recently wrote in her column: ‘I was very firmly in favour of them especially in healthcare settings, but now it seems we might finally have a definitive answer.
'Following a review of 80 international studies, the conclusion reached is that, yes, facemasks are pointless. Probably.’
It took a good deal of guts for her to say that. And I applaud her.
But a lot of other people still need to climb down, especially the hospitals, GP and dental surgeries, opticians and workplaces where mask-wearing is still encouraged, and naked faces are frowned upon.
I would personally hope for a sign of contrition from the Independent Press Standards Organisation, which in 2021 censured me for saying a major study had found masks to be useless.
This was an obvious piece of comment, not a news report.
And it was my firmly held opinion. Nonetheless, IPSO forced this newspaper to publish a correction.
The irony of this was that I was also the author of one of the very few accurate accounts of the Danish Mask Study, which had come to much the same conclusion as the Cochrane Review, only a lot earlier.
The panic is over. Those who went too far in so many ways have a lot of confessing and apologising to do.
So, if you wish to cover your face, it’s your business, and please recognise that the rest of us are just as entitled to refrain from doing so.
