You've not refuted anything about your own methodological error or conspiratorial bent, but just cast doubt on the sources I gave. We can do that all day. The Cochrane review is controversial and has pretty clearly been misinterpreted by some. Check out some of the commentary by doctors on FactCheck (https://www.factcheck.org/2023/03/scicheck-what-the-cochrane... - sources included):
- Aggregating the three studies together, he said, “they show a consistent and fairly convincing effect.”
- “Taken together, these two RCTs are consistent with a small reduction in risk,”
- "“To me, this shows that there is a reasonably clear modest benefit to community masking interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic, decreasing the rate of infections in groups of people who are given masks and told to wear them by ~13%," he said. “That’s quite an important benefit in the context of a pandemic.”
I'm not sure why you think your opinion on what constitutes a high quality source is somehow superior to that of the thousands of experts who have concluded otherwise. Unless you are also an epidemiologist and a scholar I'm not convinced your cherry picking is worth more than anyone else's. I'm okay with leaving things up to them. But even if you are, you're in the minority.
Point is:
1) a modest increase protection is amplified by a network effect. There is evidence pointing to that increase.
2) people's lives depend on this, so if there's any uncertainty, do the reasonable, socially responsible thing and put up with the minor inconvenience of a mask, just out of caution
3) I don't need to understand every source as I don't pretend to be an expert. We already have those (that presumably aren't all part of big-mask) and they can and should be trusted to fairly weigh up the available evidence and advise us.
Your motivation to conclude one way just seems irrational, suggesting you aren't an expert either.
- Aggregating the three studies together, he said, “they show a consistent and fairly convincing effect.”
- “Taken together, these two RCTs are consistent with a small reduction in risk,”
- "“To me, this shows that there is a reasonably clear modest benefit to community masking interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic, decreasing the rate of infections in groups of people who are given masks and told to wear them by ~13%," he said. “That’s quite an important benefit in the context of a pandemic.”
I'm not sure why you think your opinion on what constitutes a high quality source is somehow superior to that of the thousands of experts who have concluded otherwise. Unless you are also an epidemiologist and a scholar I'm not convinced your cherry picking is worth more than anyone else's. I'm okay with leaving things up to them. But even if you are, you're in the minority.
Point is: 1) a modest increase protection is amplified by a network effect. There is evidence pointing to that increase.
2) people's lives depend on this, so if there's any uncertainty, do the reasonable, socially responsible thing and put up with the minor inconvenience of a mask, just out of caution
3) I don't need to understand every source as I don't pretend to be an expert. We already have those (that presumably aren't all part of big-mask) and they can and should be trusted to fairly weigh up the available evidence and advise us.
Your motivation to conclude one way just seems irrational, suggesting you aren't an expert either.