And googling the key line there reveals a full page of Google results with articles explaining how both the initial assumptions and methodology was flawed. It was surprising even to me how easy it was to find rebuttals.
Speaking as someone who actually has an advanced degree in science and understands how to read papers and interpret medical evidence (unlike Tufecki, who has literally zero scientific training or understanding of statistics) has read ~every paper on masks ever published, the "rebuttals" there are nonsense.
The Cochrane review was not incorrect; it was not retracted. The "apology from Cochrane" was not about the paper itself, and they didn't say that the conclusions were wrong. The NY Times and the Washington Post and Gavi are just wrong, and they're lying. Full stop. By literally the same standards of evidence they are using ("the lower bound of the confidence interval crosses 1.0, so we can't exclude the possibility of benefit"), Ivermectin and HCQ "work" against Covid. So you either accept both claims, or you reject both.
We have two political teams, each advancing separate-but-equal forms of pseudo-sciencey twaddle, and neither side is willing to admit that the actual data doesn't back their opinions:
Gonna go with "wearing a mask to stop particulate spread" is not separate but equal from taking horse dewormer. (And it's not an exaggeration to characterize it as such when they're literally buying drugs from farm suplly stores and injecting amounts meant for livestock over the course of a few days.)
Similarly, I don't know anyone who has died from wearing a mask.
This is not even to mention the numerous other studies, experiments, and demsonstartsions of all sorts of respiratory protective gear that show effectiveness against particulates smaller even than COVID-19.
As per your first link, rate of infection with masks was 90% the rate of infection without masks. I mean, technically it "works" even if reduces the rates of infection by 0.0000001%. But most people are not going to see much benefit in masking if it only reduces the rate marginally.
The intensity of the push for masking was not at all matched by the effectiveness of masking. From most people's perspectives, if the rate of infection with masking is 90% the rate with no masking then masking doesn't work in layperson's terms.
The Cochrane review was not incorrect; it was not retracted. The "apology from Cochrane" was not about the paper itself, and they didn't say that the conclusions were wrong. The NY Times and the Washington Post and Gavi are just wrong, and they're lying. Full stop. By literally the same standards of evidence they are using ("the lower bound of the confidence interval crosses 1.0, so we can't exclude the possibility of benefit"), Ivermectin and HCQ "work" against Covid. So you either accept both claims, or you reject both.
We have two political teams, each advancing separate-but-equal forms of pseudo-sciencey twaddle, and neither side is willing to admit that the actual data doesn't back their opinions:
https://sensiblemed.substack.com/p/the-cochrane-mask-fiasco