The lead researcher on the only actual RCT to be performed on mask efficacy during this entire debacle, was asked why his study hasn't been published yet even though it has already been completed. His reply: "As soon as a journal is brave enough."
https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/sta...75939238420480
Wow.
Dr. Benfield is Professor of infectious diseases at the Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Copenhagen, and attending physician at the Department of Infectious Diseases, Hvidovre Hospital, Copenhagen. Assistant editor of The Journal of the Danish Medical Association. But in today's clown world, that surely doesn't make him enough of an "expert" to understand The Science.
As an interesting but related side point, this is a great illustration of why we have issues with the evidence-based fetishists among the exercise science crowd. When a vested interest controls what gets published and what doesn't (not to mention what research gets funded in the 1st place, even before publication), then when you demand "citations desperately needed," what you are actually doing is the same thing as the guy who drops his keys at night and only looks for them under the streetlamps. When asked why, he responds, "because that is where the light is."
It's not that there is no value at all in the studies - some are bad, some are better, like most studies. It's that there is a whole entire level of manipulation that can (and so of course, does) take place before you even get to what research is funded and what studies are published. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. That alone doesn't positively prove anything of course, but it does give necessary broader context to what should actually constitute evidence in the field.