What Changed? Laurie Garrett's 2018 Position on Masks
What Changed? Laurie Garrett's 2018 Position on Masks
My friend @snorwood found a fascinating 2018 keynote address given by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laurie Garrett. Although Garrett has been a strong universal-masking proponent during the Covid-19 pandemic, she took a much more skeptical position when addressing an audience question at this National Academy of Medicine event.
I’m not sure what changed Garrett’s mind, but I agree with Phil Kerpen that her 2018 is a “wonderful explanation of the real rationale for masking.”
Transcript below.
Audience Member: My name is Christopher Eddie I'm with AllOne Health Systems LLC. I’d just like to thank you so much for [your book] The Coming Plague. It did indeed change my life. I had it on my desk as Environmental Health Director for over 10 years, under my dictionary. I’d like know if you have any thoughts about alternate transmission pathways and influenza, such as fecal-oral contaminated surfaces, fomites, and how significant some of those could be in the future.
Laurie Garrett: It's a really good question let me just put it in a context for the whole audience.
If we today said, “Oh it's happening. There's a really nasty bug out there, and it's carrying with it tremendous virulence and it seems to be like the 2009 virus — very, very efficient at human to human transmission,” then everybody in this room and all of your friends and family would want to know how do we protect ourselves.
And that would immediately go to, “What do we know about, exactly?” You know, how important is sneezing versus…how much just washing your hands matter. Is there any kind of mask that actually keeps this virus out? If so where do I get, you know, 5,000 of them?
And you go on and on down the list, and what you can see is that there are practical recommendations that I'm sure everybody in this room would follow, because you would for any infectious agent. You know, wash your hands, cover your mouth when you're coughing, that sort of thing.
But as you get further down to real hardcore specifics you see that there's a tremendous amount of unknowns.
There's only a couple of countries that have ever really done large-scale studies to try and figure out what might work Japan it may not surprise you as one of them. And they, in one of their large studies, they basically showed that the masks, it seemed like the major efficacy of a mask, is that it causes alarm in the other person. And so you stay away from each other.
And that's what I think happened with SARS. When I was in the SARS epidemic, I saw everywhere, all over Asia, people started wearing these masks. And it is alarming when you walk down the street and everybody coming towards you has a mask on. You definitely do social distancing. You definitely, it's just a gut thing, but did the mask really help them? Did the mask keep the virus out? Almost certainly not, if they, if the virus was in there around their face, the mask would not have made the difference.
So I think this is an area that's always been under-researched, underfunded. It's not a sexy area and it's not an area that results in product development that somebody sees is highly lucrative.
So, I mean, if you put that Purell stuff on your hand all day long is it really doing anything for you? Is it really — and would it protect you from influenza? You know, I'm not the one to say what you should do. I'm not a licensed physician, so I cannot give you medical advice, but what I will say is that I think this is an area that needs a great deal more attention.
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