['Hamas' Jenkins]

For those without a background in EBM--

It took those authors several months to get their findings published, in part because there are massive issues with the study. Every study has limitations, but theirs are so numerous in the investigational process that you might as well chuck the data.

First, it's near impossible to have a truly randomized clinical trial of good rigor when you rely on the public to self-report adherence. Everyone always overstates how adherent they are to therapies, even for life-threatening conditions like congestive heart failure. Relying on self-reporting is a great way to have garbage-in-garbage-out data, which is why in most traditional clinical trials the clinician/investigator sees the intervention actually administered to the patient.

Secondly, the study was implemented during a massive lockdown in the country in question when most of the people were at home...where people don't wear masks, even in lockdown situations, which eliminates any ability to predict the efficacy of the intervention.

Finally, the reliance on antibody tests with a high false-positive rate relative to community levels of spread at the time of data collection further muddies any attempt to draw a definitive conclusion from the data.

Just like how people misunderstood the earlier mask study and spouted off the "85% of people with masks got COVID" line that was unsupported by the actual data in the study, they will misunderstand this as well, because the sad fact of the matter is that most people are not trained to properly read and interpret this data.