Even Biden flouts the CDC’s debunked diktats – but bafflingly America’s health elite continue to push it on our kids. Now two esteemed MEDICS make a passionate case that there’s no evidence masks stop COVID

Marty Makary MD, MPH is a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and author. Tracy Beth Høeg, MD, PhD is a physician epidemiologist at the University of California-San Francisco.

“Don’t tell them I didn’t have it on,” President Joe Biden deadpanned to a crowd at the White House on Wednesday, waving a black surgical mask.

Less than 48 hours earlier, First Lady Jill Biden tested positive for COVID-19.

The president’s test came back negative, but his staff said he would “mask up” for 10 days, in accordance with CDC recommendations.

Apparently he doesn’t take that advice very seriously.

Biden also had his mask removed Tuesday during a Medal of Honor ceremony for fellow octogenarian and Vietnam veteran Larry L. Taylor. Biden then walked through the audience – without a mask.

Frankly, the president seems to agree with us on this.

One of the biggest public health interventions of our time – masking – has been systematically studied by doctors and epidemiologists with impeccable credentials in evidence-based medicine, and they have found no evidence that masks reduce the number of COVID infections .

No wonder Biden thinks wearing a mask is unnecessary.

This is also the conclusion of reviews from the renowned British medical research group, the Cochrane Collaborationwhich recently looked at 17 high-quality, randomized analyzes of the effectiveness of mask wearing.

So why are some in the US – including the US Public Health Institute at the Centers for Disease Control – choosing to ignore this?

Make no mistake: Masking is making a comeback as COVID cases rise across the country.

This week, a Maryland school district reinstated mask mandates for elementary school students exposed to COVID-positive classmates. The children will have to cover their faces for ten days.

A Hollywood studio temporarily reimposed mask mandates, as did an Atlanta university, which also banned large gatherings on campus.

But why? We now know that masking for COVID doesn’t work.

The sad reality is that Americans traumatized by the COVID pandemic are looking to the CDC for thoughtful, sincere guidance — but in return, all they get is confusing, counterfactual nonsense.

On Saturday, Dr. Anthony Fauci was confronted about the Cochrane review on CNN. He responded by saying, “Yes, but there are other studies.”

Dr. Tom Jefferson of Oxford, who led the Cochrane analysis on masks, responded to Fauci.

“Fauci may be relying on waste studies,” he concluded.

Indeed.

Perhaps Fauci was referring to the CDC’s 2020 study from two hairstylists? Hardly, a significant sample.

Maybe he was referring a CDC study which measured infections for only a few weeks. That investigation was complete debunked by two researchers, including Dr. Hoeg, when the same study was extended to nine weeks.

He may have been thinking about an analysis of Boston schools from the New England Journal of Medicine that claimed mask mandates would reduce COVID cases by as much as 30 percent.

That was also found by The research group of Dr. Hoeg, including scientists from UCSF and Stanford, to have used inappropriate methods. When the proper routine was followed, the researchers came to the opposite conclusion.

The public health elites who continue to claim that “masks work” make it clear that they have completely lost their scientific objectivity.

In September 2021, medical research as political propaganda reached an all-time high when the CDC has released a review of masking students.

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky claimed that schools with mask requirements saw a 3.5-fold reduction in COVID outbreaks. But the claim did not last long.

Just one of the many shortcomings of the study was that many of the school districts involved were not even open during the study period.

For that reason alone, many have called for the paper to be withdrawn.

It should also be recognized that the US public health recommendations are an outlier.

The CDC still recommends that children ages two and older wear masks during times of high COVID-19 disease burden (except when napping or eating at school). But many European countries, which have largely never recommended masks for children under six or even 12 years old, have abandoned masks in schools entirely.

However, that doesn’t mean that masks are completely useless, or may never be necessary in the future.

Surgeons wear masks in the operating room to prevent respiratory droplets from entering the surgical field. As physicians, when we see a patient with tuberculosis, we wear tight-fitting N95 masks during the brief encounter with the patient.

It is possible that two people wearing well-fitting, high-quality masks could temporarily reduce transmission risk, and there may be a theoretical benefit to wearing a mask during times of high viral spread.

But proper mask-wearing practices are difficult to enforce. Even medical professionals who wear masks for extended periods of time often do so inappropriately or remove them at the end of their shift.

The truth is that the American public health system is ignoring this comprehensive research simply because they don’t like the results.

They have abandoned the art of critically assessing research methodology and replaced it with partisan dogma.

Now that’s how science should work. And the catastrophic damage already done to public health trust will only worsen as the intellectual dishonesty and arrogance of these officials continues.

Perhaps now that even President Biden, who once said wearing masks was a “patriotic duty,” has apparently lost confidence in the CDC’s statements, they will come to their senses.

But we’re not holding our breath.