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NIH-funded research collaborative redacts emails on why it disavowed 'gold standard' mask study
[JustTheNews] As public and private institutions resume or consider mask mandates in the wake of a small uptick in COVID-19 hospitalizations and new viral variants, an international research collaborative funded by the National Institutes of Health is facing new scrutiny for how it came to publicly downplay its 17 years of research finding that masks make "little to no difference."U.K-based nonprofit Cochrane, often described as the "gold standard" of evidence-based medicine, heavily redacted its internal discussions on how to respond to questions about alleged conflicts of interest that may have shaped its March statement deeming the systematic review's results "inconclusive" without changing its content. It turned over largely unreadable documents to former Senate Finance Committee investigator Paul Thacker, now an independent journalist, in response to his request for the "personal data" Cochrane holds on Thacker under Article 15 of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. The State Department did roughly the same in a Freedom of Information Act production in August, prompted by litigation. It heavily redacted discussions of how to respond to reporters asking about its funding of a group that tries to starve conservative publishers of ad revenue. "They have no justification" for the redactions, Thacker told Just the News, asking rhetorically why Congress wasn't scrutinizing a taxpayer-funded organization whose mask research — or perception thereof — has played a pivotal role in U.S. policy. Cochrane says it has received £500K to 1 million from NIH. Cochrane spokesperson Harry Dayantis said it was "usually illegal" to disclose information "about individuals other than the requester" under this "very specific and limited type of request," pointing Just the News to the U.K. Information Commissioner's office. The Cochrane systematic review, which has evaluated masking first against influenza and then COVID since 2006, posed a problem for the federal government’s ongoing pro-mask guidance, but so does an increasing body of research that questions whether sustained mask use is benign. Then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told Congress the Cochrane study was suspect because it relied on randomized controlled trials rather than the observational evidence the CDC favors, but she also inaccurately claimed Cochrane had "retracted" it. The House Appropriations Committee later fixed the hearing record at the authors' request. Posted by: Skidmark 2023-09-07 |
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