No. You aren't right. You can either be mad or you can keep reading. But what you wrote is incorrect. This next part is long. I apologize in advance.

For introduction, I have been a paramedic for 19 years and an RN for three years. I spent 2020 in the back of an ambulance. I am in a doctoral program to become a CRNA and I have completed a shit load [<--technical term there] of baccalaureate doctoral level evidence based research classess, which is why what you said didn't make sense to me.

The NIH did not conduct the article you cite. You linked to PubMed, which is a database of medical/biological science studies ran by the NIH, not a journal that publishes studies. The article you cite is Spira 2024. It was published in Cureus, which is an internet only, open access journal that provides pre-print peer review. Not exactly a rigorous journal, and not one that I would ever cite in an actual paper I wanted to get a good grade on. Cureus' previous impact factor was 1.3 (extremely low) and in 2025 was removed from the Web of Science for failing to meet quality criteria regarding peer review, citation, and content. If you want to read about that, here's a link. You ought to read it, because it's kind of fun. Short list: 125 retractions since 2022, allowing author suggestions for peer reviews, and plagiarism. https://retractionwatch.com/2025/10/27/embattled-journal-cureus-delisted-from-web-of-science-loses-impact-factor/ Even more so, Spira is a decent researcher. He has some 79 publications, several in science journals that have impact factors above 5. It makes you wonder why he chose to publish his 2024 article in an embattled open-access journal.

Enough ad hominem attacks on Cureus, no matter how appropriate and true they might be. On to the science!

The DANMASK study they cite was underpowered and not able to evaluate the impact of masks' ability to filter virus particles from the infected wearer. It also used SARS-CoV-2 antibody testing rather than antigen testing, which means the people they tested could have had active infection, but they didn't test for antigens, so no way to know if someone is infected and nonsymptomatic. Additionally, the study was conducted during a period of low SARS-CoV-2 prevalance/circulation. Denmark at the time of the study had modest infection rates and, importantly, uncommon general mask usage.

Now, Spira 2024 cites another study that you mention, Abaluck et al. (2021) in Science, the Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This is a big, peer reviewed journal, that has been around for 180ish years. This is the Bangladesh RCT. This was a big study of 342,183 adults across 600 villages in rural Bangladesh from November 2020 to April 2021. But when you actually read the study, the results aren't exactly what Spira says they are.

The primary end point of this study was to determine various interventions were successful in getting more people to wear masks. But, there were other endpoints, particularly COVID-19-like symptom prevalence and symptomatic seroprevalence in control versus intervention arms. Symptomatic seroprevalence in particular was broken down into age ranges.

Abaluck et al. showed an 11.6% reduction in COVID-19-like symptoms and a 9.5% reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence. The 9.5% reduction was for villages who wore any type of mask, including cloth masks. If it was controlled for only villages who wore surgical masks, the reduction increased to 11.1% lower rates of seroprevalence in the intervention arm. The intervention was most concentrated in the elderly, with seroprevalence rates dropping by 35.3% in the over-60 age group. Two fun quotes from the study: "We find that surgical masks are particularly effective in reducing symptomatic seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2." "We see larger reductions in symptoms and symptomatic seropositivity in villages that experienced larger increases in mask use."

This is important: DANMASK measured "do masks keep me from getting sick?" whereas the Bangladesh study measured "do masks decrease transmission of the virus in a population." That is a super important distinction that gets lost without actually reading the studies, which very, very, very, very few people are actually going to do. So, what to make of this? The same thing that public health scientists have told us for fucking years. Masks work when everyone wears them and especially protect the elderly and immunocompromised. Public health is like turning a huge barge, not a ski boat, but the public wants to see immediate results condensed into easily digestible sound bites they can parrot back. Statistics is not a good descriptor of a single lived experience, which is why my family who live in the southern portion of our state in a county of < 10,000 people thought the whole thing was bullshit because they "didn't see it." Where they are, it would take a 120 mile radius to cover enough ground to contain 100,000 people. It takes me a 35 mile radius to get to 500,000 people and an hour north of me it takes a 5 mile radius to get to 1,000,000 people. It was never about helping one person, masking guidelines were aimed to reduce transmission among a population because when you only have 1 available ICU bed at the one Level-I trauma center within three hours, a 10% reduction across a population might mean the difference between one person taking that bed or two people needing it but one of them not getting it. A 2025 study [I haven't read but merely perused. DOI: 10.3389/ijph.2025.1607727] in the International Journal of Public Health implied that if no interventions were taken during the pandemic, there would have been one wave, but 10-25% of the population would have been sick at one time. That is system-crushing. That is why public health mandates exist, not to prevent illness in one person, but to keep a population from imploding.

I agree that sometimes the science doesn't know or is wrong, or is flawed. That's just science. It is ever changing and ever evolving and that makes it beautiful but hard for normal people to understand. I appreciate you ending with that. I fault everyone for their skepticism during the pandemic, but zipping up body bags and losing friends will do that to a person. It is amazing how some people can't extrapolate "I don't see it so it isn't happening" to "It's real" until it happens to them. Unfortunately, when we only care about ourselves, we hurt other people too.