Book review of The Face Mask Cult by Hector Drummond, CantusHead Books 2022
I bought this book as a show of support for a fellow traveler, not knowing if I'd read it as I was already skeptical about facemasks, but I opened it up while bored on a train and ended up reading the whole thing with great interest.
Prior to 2020 I already knew that the evidence for masks was sparse because I'd looked it up many years earlier, when I lived in Asia and was curious about the phenomenon. At that time, I'd concluded that masks went in parallel with gargling green tea to ward off influenza, stretching your left knee in order to get rid of a wart on your right hand, and thinking Westerners are fat because they eat bread instead of healthy white rice: Oriental arguments-from-authority that persist through the generations, impervious to scientific evidence, and reinforced by socially unassailable, octogenarian doctors who wouldn't know what a Cochrane was if they found one sitting in their high-waisted underpants.
Mask skepticism was the evidence-based position of Western experts cough cough when coronadoom out in China. Then the scientific method was thrown out in the mad rush by our rulers to show they could do something – anything – to Stop The Spread.
This is where The Face Mask Cult starts from.
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