Pulitzer Prize-Winning Health Journalist Revealed the Real Purpose of Masks in 2018: Fear

"When I was in the SARS epidemic, I saw it everywhere, all over Asia people started wearing these masks and it is alarming..."

Pulitzer Prize  and Peabody Award winning journalist Laurie Garrett gave a refreshingly honest and clear-eyed assessment of the usefulness of masks in fighting coronavirus pandemics. Unfortunately, her assessment, given as the Keynote Address at the National Academy of Medicine in December 2018, was given prior to the Covid-19 outbreak. Garrett, a Council of Foreign Relations member, spilled the beans in a presentation called "From the 1918 Influenza Pandemic to 2009 H1N1 Pandemic to Now: Is the World Ready to Respond to the Next Outbreak?"

After her presentation, which periodically cast doubt on the historical utility of general public masking around the world, she fielded a question from a member of the audience on such measures. This was her candid response. Watch:

Phil Kerpen @kerpen

Wonderful explanation of the real rationale for masking here from @Laurie_Garrett to the National Academy of Medicine in 2018. Hat tip @snorman1776.

"Let me just put it in context for the whole audience," Garrett replied. "What if we today said 'uh 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?'" she continued. "And that would immediately go to, 'what do we know about exactly?' You know, how important is sneezing versus —thank you for the sound cue over here. Coughing... how much does washing your hands matter?"

"You know, is there any kind of mask that actually keeps this virus out?" she added. "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," Garrett went on. "But as you get further down to real hardcore specifics, you see that there's a tremendous amount of unknowns."

"And there's only a couple of countries that have ever really done large scale studies to try and figure out what might work," she said. "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."

Garrett expanded on the clinical findings with a personal anecdote…