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The science:
1. A Danish RCT with 6000 participants, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in November 2020, found no statistically significant effect of high-quality medical face masks against SARS-CoV-2 infection in a community setting.
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
1. A Danish RCT with 6000 participants, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in November 2020, found no statistically significant effect of high-quality medical face masks against SARS-CoV-2 infection in a community setting.
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
2. A May 2020 meta-study on pandemic influenza published by the US CDC found that face masks had no effect, neither as personal protective equipment nor as a source control.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article
3. A July 2020 review by the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medince found that there is no evidence for the effectiveness of cloth masks against virus infection or transmission. https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-politics/
4. A May 2020 cross-country study by the University of East Anglia (preprint) found that a mask requirement was of no benefit and could even increase the risk of infection.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.20088260v1.full.pdf
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.20088260v1.full.pdf
5. An April 2020 review by two US professors in respiratory and infectious disease from the University of Illinois concluded that face masks have no effect in everyday life, neither as self-protection nor to protect third parties (source control). https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/commentary-masks-all-covid-19-not-based-sound-data
6. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine from May 2020 came to the conclusion that cloth face masks offer little to no protection in everyday life. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2006372
7. A 2015 study in the British Medical Journal BMJ Open found that cloth masks were penetrated by 97% of particles and may increase infection risk by retaining moisture or repeated use. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577
And then there's this:
This is a great aggregator. They have another excellent page for covid in general: https://swprs.org/face-masks-evidence/
