[wrp]

The selected quotes misrepresent the thrust of the article. From the abstract, "...overall there is a lack of substantial evidence to support claims that facemasks protect either patient or surgeon from infectious contamination."

At the end, they take the stance that while evidence doesn't support any benefit, it doesn't indicate harm either, so might as well continue using masks.

I don't deny that this is still a matter of controversy, compare Romney (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11289767/) with Belkin (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11886203/).

The most frequent complaint is that most research on the subject is not high quality, but what about those studies that are good? The most thorough clinical study is Tunevall (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1853618/), which clearly supports no benefit. There are apparently no high quality studies that support benefit.