Bret Stephens Misrepresents Study to Claim Anti-maskers are Owed an Apology

 

On Tuesday NY Times Columnist Bret Stephens ran an op-ed where he dripped contempt for people who said masks work. He thinks we all owe him and other anti-maskers a big fat apology.

He cites a new review of scientific literature as evidence that masks really don't work. He quotes one of the study's authors (an epidemiologist who I suppose he interviewed) as saying there is no evidence that masks work, and no evidence that hand washing and air filtration work either.

He then whines about how badly the anti-maskers were treated when they were right all along. No mention of poor treatment of pro-maskers. I guess it's OK since they were wrong all along?

Here's the thing. Look at the "plain language summary" written by the authors of the  actual study: 

We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed.

Hand hygiene programmes may help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses.

That doesn't say masks don't work, does it? No, it says the research is inconclusive. 

Digging into the details, and to be fair, they do review a lot of of studies where there were no effects for masks. These were random assignment studies done in various contexts, but we don't know details of the designs, the sample sizes, and how those factors might have affected the outcomes. 

But I am disinclined to do a deep dive on this for several reasons:

  • Stephens is a self-identified conservative who used to work for the Wall Street Journal and Jerusalem Post, and has also appeared on Fox News. He is flogging a conservative talking point, so I would expect to find that he cherry-picking and/or distorting information that supports his point of view.
  • The study is apparently a review of other published studies. It does not appear to be a meta-analysis, which aggregates the statistical results of the component studies to create a larger sample size. This is important because larger samples increase the chances of detecting effects.
  • Federal health officials accept that  COVID-19 is primarily airborne. Masks have been proven to filter aerosols of the size that carry COVID-19 (as shown in many posts here). Logically, it can't be true that masks have no effect.
  • Other respiratory diseases, which are also known to be transmitted via the air, also plummeted during the pandemic. If none of the mitigation measures are effective, why did this happen?
As I have noted before, mask effectiveness may well be an impossible question to answer scientifically because of the difficulty of designing a good randomized controlled trial with a good sample size and all the proper controls.

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