On March 28, 2020, as COVID-19 cases began to shut down public life in much of the United States, then-Surgeon General Jerome Adams issued an advisory on Twitter: The general public should not wear masks. โThere is scant or conflicting evidence they benefit individual wearers in a meaningful way,โ he wrote.
Adamsโ advice was in line with messages from other US officials and the World Health Organization. Days later, though, US public health leaders shifted course. Mask-wearing was soon a pandemic-control strategy worldwide, but whether this strategy succeeded is now a matter of heated debateโparticularly after a major new analysis, released in January, seemed to conclude that masks remain an unproven strategy for curbing transmission of COVID-19 and other respiratory viruses.
โThereโs still no evidence that masks are effective during a pandemic,โ the studyโs lead author, physician, and epidemiologist Tom Jefferson, recently told an interviewer.
Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, argues that the Justice Department has victimized and attempted to silence conservative parents.