The clamour for the return of face masks is a triumph of unreason, and a blow to science.

But I would fiercely defend your freedom to wear one if you want to.
If covering your face with a piece of cloth makes you feel safer or kinder, far be it from me to stop you.

It is none of my business, and none of the Government's business, what other people wear, on their faces or anywhere else (except for the needs of personal modesty).

In return, I ask only that you do me the same favour, and do not urge me, let alone try to compel me, to don a garment which I think silly, pointless and politicised.

If I put it on, I would be pretending to believe controversial things that I don't think are true.

It would be like forcing someone who loathes Donald Trump to wear a 'Make America Great Again' baseball cap in public. And so it would be enforced speech, and a major blow to liberty.

Yet we could be heading towards such things again. An editorial in The Times today asserted, beneath the headline 'Wear a Mask', that this is 'the responsible thing to do'.
Is that really so?

Evidence

The frenzy for face masks is one of the oddest crazes to sweep the advanced world.

Let's begin with the evidence, and the mighty and revered World Health Organization (WHO).

As the great Covid fear was getting into its stride, on March 31, 2020, the executive director of the WHO health emergencies programme, Mike Ryan, spoke on the issue.

He said at a briefing in Geneva: 'There is no specific evidence to suggest the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit.
In fact, there's evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly.'

Not much later, in a series of official pamphlets for reopening shops and services, the Department for Business and Enterprise said: https://srikandijepara.com/ 'The evidence of the benefit of using a face covering to protect others is weak and the effect is likely to be small.'

This was true then, and it is still true.

The evidence was indeed weak. But, even so, we saw changes of position among experts in spring and early summer 2020.

For example, Dr Jenny Harries, then a Deputy Chief Medical Officer, warned on March 12, 2020, that people could be putting themselves more at risk from contracting Covid by wearing masks.
She said they could 'trap the virus', and cause the person wearing it to breathe it in.

She explained: 'For the average member of the public walking down a street, it is not a good idea.'

On April 3, 2020, the other Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, said he did not believe healthy people wearing them would reduce the spread of the disease in the UK.

Yet within months, the pressure to wear masks in public places would become almost irresistible. Why the shift away from scientific caution?

In The Spectator magazine, Isabel Oakeshott, who co-authored former Health Secretary Matt Hancock's Covid memoir, concluded from all that she'd heard during her research that 'Hancock, Whitty and Johnson knew full well that non-medical masks do very little to prevent transmission of the virus'.

She reckoned the origins of mask mandates in the community were the Prime Minister's adviser Dominic Cummings's obsession with masks and a desire to please Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon — 'and above all because they were symbolic of the public health emergency'.

Here is a strong clue that the campaign for mask-wearing was basically political, and not medical.

On July 12, 2020, Deborah Cohen, the then medical correspondent of BBC2's Newsnight, reported that the WHO had reversed its advice on masks, from 'don't wear them' to 'do wear them'.

But it had not done so because of scientific information. The evidence had not, in fact, backed the wearing of face coverings.

The change was down to political pressure.

Ms Cohen said on Twitter: 'We had been told by various sources [that the] WHO committee reviewing the evidence had not backed masks, but they recommended them due to political lobbying.'

Infected

She said the BBC had then put this to the WHO, which did not deny it.

But it became increasingly unpopular to say any of these things.

In November 2020, two first-rate independent experts - Carl Heneghan of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine in Oxford and the epidemiologist Tom Jefferson - walked into a storm of abuse after reporting the results of the only full-scale European study of the effectiveness of masks on those who wear them.

This Danish project, actually the work of pro-mask researchers, came up with a result that authority did not want to hear.

As Jefferson and Heneghan summed it up: 'In the end, there was no statistically significant difference between those who wore masks and those who did not when it came to being infected by Covid-19; 1.8 per cent of those wearing masks caught Covid, compared to 2.1 per cent of the control group.'

Attempts have been made to minimise this result, or to claim it supported mask-wearing.
The researchers themselves described the results as 'inconclusive'. But it is hard to argue with these figures. If the Danish study favoured mask-wearing, as has been claimed, why is it still virtually unknown?