Why Are We Still Arguing About Masks?

In the past few weeks, the conventional wisdom about COVID seems to have been upended.

Early in the pandemic, several mainstream news outlets dismissed theories that COVID came from a Chinese lab. But recently The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported that the Department of Energy reversed its prior judgment by announcing that the coronavirus probably did emerge from a laboratory. The FBI shares that assessment.

What’s more, for the past three years, many scientists and writers—including me!—have reported that masks are effective at reducing the transmission of COVID. But last month, the lead author of a comprehensive analysis of masks boldly and unequivocally asserted that “there’s no evidence that many of these things make any difference.”

That settles things: The elites got everything perfectly backwards; the lab-leak conspiracy theory was true, and the mask mandates were a fraud!

Well, not quite. The deeper you dig into the details of each case, the murkier the story becomes. In fact, the deeper you dig, the more you realize that murkiness is the story.