It’s Official, Face Masks Don’t Work (Wait, What?)

Dateline: March 14, 2023

The trusted Cochrane Library, in a paper published in January, 2023, entitled Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses, was interpreted to the effect that masks don’t help to prevent one from being infected by COVID-19 or influenza. Needless to say, that caused a giant kerfuffle with opinion-istas (or should that be opinionites) on all sides of the issue as they lined up to claim victory or to fend off defeat. We live in a world of division.

Here, at Nexvera (maker of the VeraShield XP), we said wait, what? How can masks not help at all? In the midst of all of this, on March 10, 2023, Opinion Columnist Zeynep Tufekci penned a piece in the New York Times entitled Here’s Why the Science Is Clear That Masks Work. Ms. Tufekci described the Cochrane Library like this: “Cochrane reviews are often referred to as gold standard evidence in medicine because they aggregate results from many randomized trials to reach an overall conclusion — a great method for evaluating drugs, for example, which often are subjected to rigorous but small trials. Combining their results can lead to more confident conclusions.” Ms. Tufekci bottom-lined it when she said: “Michael D. Brown, a doctor and academic who serves on the Cochrane editorial board and made the final decision on the review, told me the review couldn’t arrive at a firm conclusion because there weren’t enough high-quality randomized trials with high rates of mask adherence.”

“So, to summarize, when you don’t wear face masks they don’t work!” Ok, that makes sense.

In any event, Karla Soares-Weiser, Editor-in-Chief of the Cochrane Library, also on March 10, 2023 apologized on behalf of Cochrane, stating: “Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that 'masks don't work', which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation.” The rest of the apology aligned with the notion that distributing masks is not the true measure of how many people, with access to face masks, wore them. That also makes sense.

Here's what we think. Masks help and if you want to wear a face mask to help to protect yourself and others you should. We also, of course, think that our VeraShield XP active protection mask does a great job at its job, and we keep trying to prove that (and improve on our designs) every day.