But you DID believe in masking as a virtue
signal.
Masks have been and continue to be promoted by official bodies in my country – Brazil – by our FDA equivalent (ANVISA) and also by some state governors and city mayors. Masking was mandatory in planes throughout the country until March 1st 2023, and in public transportation in some cities, including São Paulo, the biggest city in Latin America, they are still required. Although from a mechanistic (laboratory experiments) and intuitive point of view masks are plausible interventions, their effectiveness has not been validated in randomized controlled trials (RCTs).
This fact was correctly pointed out by the president of the Brazilian Federal Council of Medicine in
a letter to ANVISA, who bravely said: “The use of masks as virtue signaling or as a measure of a sense of social belonging can never be imposed on people who do not share such ideologies or behaviors, especially in the absence of scientific evidence or even possible harm to the patient’s health, as it is in the case at hand.”
The requirement that masks pass through RCTs is not a mere formality; drugs and therapies are rarely approved without one or more RCTs with clear and statistically significant results. The effectiveness of masks in reducing viral transmission was tested in several RCTs before and after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
These studies were reviewed and updated by Cochrane researchers in a
300-page paper published in late January 2023. To those who are not familiar with this organization, Cochrane is an international network of collaborators whose mission is to analyze and summarize the best evidence from biomedical research, without interference from commercial and financial interests, and is the leading global advocate for evidence-based health care. Cochrane reviews are internationally recognized as the benchmark for high-quality information.