As it turns out, even Cochrane itself is now saying that commentators who believe the review concluded that masks were useless were simply wrong. In a statement published on Friday, Cochrane Library editor-in-chief Karla Soares-Weiser wrote that the review’s results were “inconclusive” on whether “interventions to promote mask wearing help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses.”

Cochrane blamed a poorly worded plain-language summary of the review’s conclusions that could be misinterpreted to make it seem as if the authors were uncertain on whether masks themselves could actually slow the spread of respiratory viruses; in fact, the review examined whether interventions to encourage mask wearing slow the spread of such viruses, and said that the relative paucity of good studies on the subject made it hard to draw a clear conclusion.

As the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote Friday in a smart New York Times piece on the controversy, both the review itself and much of the reaction were deeply flawed.

Source: The controversy over the Cochrane review on Covid masks, explained – Vox