“Our study found no evidence that mandatory masking of staff impacts the rate of hospital SARS-CoV-2 infection with the Omicron variant,” said lead author Dr. Ben Patterson of St. George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, London.

“The bottom line is that lifting the hospital mask mandate did not lead to a measurable increase in hospital-acquired COVID infections,” Jeanne Noble, associate professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told Healthline, adding that the research was more robust than previous observational trials.

In other words, the two most recent studies on masking suggest masks were terribly ineffective in reducing the spread of Covid, but came with clear health harms. Yet countries across the world and states across the US were mandating their use for months if not years.