“Today, the New York Times published a Forbidden Fact,” Christina Pushaw tweeted late last night. “It only took them THREE YEARS.”

Well, that’s not quite accurate. The New York Times finally got around to publishing a Forbidden Opinion. Center-right columnist Bret Stephens finally informed the Gray Lady’s readers of the publication by British gold-standard institution Cochrane of “the most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including COVID-19[.]” It’s the first mention in the NYT of the study, despite its publication by the Cochrane Library exactly a month ago and wide discussion of it this past fortnight or more.

The big tell in Stephens’ excellent column, to which we’ll get in a moment, is that he needed to link to sources outside the NYT to ground his argument. Since the NYT won’t cover the story, Stephens links to one journalist who did, Maryanne Demasi … on February 5th. Demasi interviewed lead author Tom Jefferson to discuss the import of the study, and Jefferson didn’t mince words:

JEFFERSON: There is just no evidence that they make any difference. Full stop. My job, our job as a review team, was to look at the evidence, we have done that. Not just for masks. We looked at hand washing, sterilisation, goggles etcetera…

…

DEMASI: May I just ask a finer point on masks… it’s not that masks don’t work, it’s just that there is no evidence they do work…is that right?

JEFFERSON: There’s no evidence that they do work, that’s right. It’s possible they could work in some settings….we’d know if we’d done trials. All you needed was for Tedros [from WHO] to declare it’s a pandemic and they could have randomised half of the United Kingdom, or half of Italy, to masks and the other half to no masks. But they didn’t. Instead, they ran around like headless chickens.

DEMASI: I’ve worked as a political advisor, so I know that Governments don’t like to appear “uncertain,” they like to act as if they are in control of the situation….

JEFFERSON: Well, there’s always uncertainty. Masking became a “visible” political gesture, which is a point we make over and over again now.  Washing hands and sanitation and vaccination are not overtly visible, but wearing a mask is.

Hmmm. Does anyone wonder why the New York Times never bothered to have a reporter interview Jefferson? Or even report on this interview, which Demasi published sixteen days ago?

Sure seems like the NYT wants to keep treating masks as a Forbidden Fact. And that’s what makes Stephens’ column a bit surprising, because he too does not hold back on the implications of this Cochrane study. Mask policies were an utter failure, Stephens writes, and that has massive consequences for the “experts” and the politicians that imposed mandates on the entire country. Or at least it should:

Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as “misinformers” for opposing mandates were right. The mainstream experts and pundits who supported mandates were wrong. In a better world, it would behoove the latter group to acknowledge their error, along with its considerable physical, psychological, pedagogical and political costs.

Don’t count on it. In congressional testimony this month, Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called into question the Cochrane analysis’s reliance on a small number of Covid-specific randomized controlled trials and insisted that her agency’s guidance on masking in schools wouldn’t change. If she ever wonders why respect for the C.D.C. keeps falling, she could look to herself, and resign, and leave it to someone else to reorganize her agency.

That, too, probably won’t happen: We no longer live in a culture in which resignation is seen as the honorable course for public officials who fail in their jobs.

Even if it doesn’t result in formal accountability for incompetence, that does not mean that the consequences vanish. The anger and fury not only over the bad policies but also the attempts to quash debate and dissent — which turned out to be correct — will have a corrosive effect on trust in science, Stephens predicts, especially with the CDC:

But the costs go deeper. When people say they “trust the science,” what they presumably mean is that science is rational, empirical, rigorous, receptive to new information, sensitive to competing concerns and risks. Also: humble, transparent, open to criticism, honest about what it doesn’t know, willing to admit error.

The C.D.C.’s increasingly mindless adherence to its masking guidance is none of those things. It isn’t merely undermining the trust it requires to operate as an effective public institution. It is turning itself into an unwitting accomplice to the genuine enemies of reason and science — conspiracy theorists and quack-cure peddlers — by so badly representing the values and practices that science is supposed to exemplify.

True. And that didn’t start with COVID either, but the pandemic certainly accelerated it. “The science®” around climatology has been thoroughly politicized as well, and used the same tactics to silence skeptics and others who pointed out that global-warming models perform poorly against real-world outcomes. Rather than engage critics and skeptics, “the science®” has instead repeatedly tried to silence them.

And all along, the mainstream media has been the willing partner of “the science®” in enforcing these tactics. Social-media platforms jumped in with both feet too, or did until Elon Musk bought Twitter and exposed the corrupt collusion in the industry to activists posing as scientists. Now no one “trusts the science,” because what we get isn’t science at all — it’s a cult with lab coats, where the hunt for heretics and apostates take precedence over true scientific debate.

This brings us back to the New York Times. Stephens probably has too much class to reveal this, but how hard did he have to fight to get his Forbidden Opinion published? The fact that the NYT still hasn’t written a word about the Cochrane study a month later anywhere other than in Stephens’ column demonstrates just how deeply invested the NYT remains in the cult of “The Science®” rather than in real data and informing the public of the truth.

Addendum: Be sure to read the entire Jefferson-Demasi interview. Cochrane also threw some roadblocks up to publication, too — in large part, Jefferson believes, of political pressure to suppress study data that showed masks to be ineffective at preventing transmission.