Do face masks work?

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, international agencies, national governments, and local public health departments claimed that their policies followed ‘the science’. The imposition of face masks in public areas was a prominent example.

‘Hands, face, space,’ we were told; the belief was that wearing a mask would prevent the transmission of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. Critics who called into question the evidence for that claim were accused of peddling ‘misinformation’. Yet the latest review of mask wearing studies suggests they were right – and that masks made little to no difference in curtailing the spread of Covid.

When the virus first arrived in the UK in 2020, the official view, based on the science of the time, was that masks had no value outside health care. This verdict drew heavily on the Cochrane Review of physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses.

The Review strengthens its conclusion to saying there is ‘probably little to no benefit’ from the use of cloth or surgical face masks in the community

Since they started in 1993, Cochrane Reviews have become the international gold standard of evidence for medical practice.