We are now in the fourth year of the COVID era.

By any definition, we are well past when policymakers could claim that emergency conditions dictate that they can make policies on best guesses made under time pressure.

Back in 2019, it was conventional wisdom that masks did little to nothing to reduce the spread of respiratory viruses, and Fauci said as much. Until April 2020, public health officials still recommended against masking.

Then, the recommendations switched in a remarkable turnaround. It suddenly became antisocial, even murderous, to fail to mask up. Mandates and social and economic sanctions were imposed, and the world turned upside-down.

Ever since then, masks have been a cultural and political flash point.

When Cochrane came out with its analysis that showed masks didn’t work, the organization was vilified, and after the publishing of the study, the world’s premier organization analyzing medical research lost funding and reach.

It speaks so poorly of medicine to continue to require this, when the Cochrane review of RCTs is negative. And to require it without cluster RCTs. People who make this decision are not scientists. They are failed admins. https://t.co/uwt27M9tVw

— Vinay Prasad MD MPH (@VPrasadMDMPH) January 3, 2024

Now that a winter wave of COVID-19 (mild) is spiking, mask mandates are beginning to return in some places. Among other things, this sparks a renewal of the old debate: do masks do anything to slow the spread of COVID-19?

One of the most bizarre things about the past few years is that the National Institutes of Health had a unique opportunity to address the debate by doing something you would think a science organization would jump at: do a randomized controlled trial.

They never did. Not when they told people masks didn’t work. Not when they changed their minds because the “science changed” (no new science had been done), and not in the three years since.

The federal government and US medical institutions have been remarkably incurious about resolving this debate and have viciously attacked anybody who refers to earlier studies on which the Cochrane review was based.

They seem to revel in their ignorance.

As Dr. Vinay Prasad–who, unlike the people who push masking, is a public health epidemiologist–points out, the NIH has a budget of billions of dollars and yet never put a dime into randomized controlled trials to settle the issue.

Trials have taken place in other countries that show masks don’t work. Still, rather than running a high-quality study here in the US, they just imposed mask mandates and went on a jihad against anybody who questioned their efficacy.

The NIH and our medical establishment have done this on all the big questions with COVID-19- completely ignoring simple ways to settle contested issues and instead focusing on pushing simple, consistent messaging that they hope will turn out to be right. They did this with vaccines, making grand claims about safety and efficacy that turned out to be false–claims that even Pfizer and Moderna wouldn’t make about preventing the spread of the virus.

Many randos on the internet have been more scientific than our public health officials, paying attention to research happening worldwide and synthesizing the data.

Our public health officials, instead, literally tell us not to do our own research while failing to do any of their own. They have produced remarkably little actual scientific research during the entire pandemic, focusing instead on suppressing all dissent.

In the video above, Dr. Prasad goes through Dr. Collin’s mea culpa and tears it apart because, by Collins’ own admission, much of what he did was political. He attacked The Great Barrington Declaration not because it was wrong but because he didn’t want the president to take it seriously. He didn’t want a debate. He wanted unanimity, even if the unanimity was incorrect.

So still, today, we see people investing time, energy, money, and emotional energy in “solutions” that not only don’t work but also create unnecessary strife in our society.

It is appalling, and in his most damning admission, Collins admits they didn’t care what damage they did to society to impose their will.

He literally says that. Watch Dr. Prasad’s video. It is damning.