Carl Zimmer: evaluation

Transcript context

…I would think the strongest argument for masks was simply that a lot of people hated them, and so they would stay home instead. We know that would work, but when people are making analogies to things like hard hats, where it’s very, very obvious physically what’s happening, that’s a sign the argument is quite weak. If I go to a social gathering for two hours, either with a mask or without a mask, and I don’t mean the highest quality medical masks — we know they work — I think it’s highly uncertain whether masks work. I’ve read a good half dozen of those papers. I didn’t think they were really very good. I came away agnostic. Not convinced masks don’t work, but it seemed to me the public health community was far too optimistic about masks and were not really following their own standards of evidence. Why is that wrong? Well, there are many different aspects to something as seemingly simple as masking. Part of the question is, what kind of masks are we talking about? The Center for Disease Control, when it decided, “Oh, maybe COVID is spreading through the air, and we need to think really fast of ways to stop it, and we have this shortage of surgical masks and N95 respirators,” they said, “Well, just put on a cloth mask. Maybe that will reduce the risk somewhat.” That was a public health measure based on some small studies from a few years before. But again, there are cloth masks, there are surgical masks, there are N95 masks, there are these masks that are called duckbill masks. When you’re asking, “Does masking work?” one of the questions is, what kind of masks are we talking about? Then we’re saying, “How are people using those masks? When people say they’re using the mask, do you see them with their nose hanging out of it?” That’s not going to work. In the same way that if you say, “Oh, motorcycle helmets will help reduce deaths on the road.” Sometimes you see someone with a helmet on and it’s unstrapped, and you’re like, “Well, that’s not going to work.” There are a lot of these questions that go into it. You will certainly see some studies that may not inspire you. But I’ve looked at a lot of these studies and talked to a lot of experts, and I would say, just judging from where we are now, that’s the consensus that I described before. What’s your best theory about the anthrax mailings?…

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