"Supporters of masks also rightly say that the Danish study looked only at whether masks protected their wearers, not at whether they stopped the infection from spreading.
But in a letter to the British Medical Journal, Dr Antonio Lazzarino, a medical doctor and epidemiologist from Imperial College London, pointed out: 'The study did not evaluate whether people with masks are less likely to infect someone else.
'However, given we now know surgical masks have limited filtering capacity, we must derive that it is very unlikely that surgical masks provide a substantial protection from an infectious wearer.'
Much credit goes to The Annals of Internal Medicine, which eventually published the Danish study. Other major scientific journals are known to have turned it down, although it has never been explained why.
Publication was months later than expected, again for unexplained reasons. The data had been gathered in spring 2020, in a large randomised controlled trial (by far the most reliable test of such things), and had involved nearly 5,000 people.
But apart from the Heneghan-Jefferson article in The Spectator and accounts in the Mail on Sunday by me and my colleague Stephen Adams, Britain's vast, diverse print and broadcast media somehow missed the story — and continue to miss it.
I believe this is because some officials and politicians thought mass mask-wearing maintained the fear and alarm that allowed them to continue with unprecedented restrictions on all our daily lives.
This method works, and could work again, unless our politicians and media act decisively against it."
