Livre d'Or

Yeah, I 100% believe in the Swiss cheese model here. There was never going to be one magic bullet, partly because the virus is transmitted by human behaviour and it's never been possible to have a public health programme that relies on everybody behaving in an ideal manner.

I do agree with some of the criticism of the Cochrane review that RCTs are not the best way to measure mask effectiveness. I do think part of the problem that has led to genuine disagreement among the scientific community about masks (aside from the political / culture war nonsense which has been thoroughly poisoned by bad actors) is confusion over whether masks are basically a medical prophylactic, or basically a physical barrier. I tend to the second view and I am therefore not that worried about RCTs. However neither side of the debate is really listening to social and behavioural scientists, and wearing masks is a behaviour first and foremost, so a lot of the conclusions are hopeless because people are missing half the data.

IMO the Cochrane authors knew full well they were walking into a shitshow. They may well have lit the fuse semi-deliberately, because academia these days has really broken incentives and sometimes publishing something controversial gets you more career recognition than publishing something correct. If it's true that Jefferson is personally anti-mask / pro-Covid, even more so. That Substack exclusive really doesn't sound like an interview with someone who carried out a neutral, objective review of the evidence and dutifully published what he found purely for the sake of advancing human knowledge.