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Tag: strong support

  • What Trump’s Victory in Iowa Reveals

    What Trump’s Victory in Iowa Reveals

    Donald Trump’s victory in the Iowa caucus was as dominant as expected, underscoring the exceedingly narrow path available to any of the Republican forces hoping to prevent his third consecutive nomination. And yet, for all Trump’s strength within the party, the results also hinted at some of the risks the GOP will face if it nominates him again.

    Based on Trump’s overwhelming lead in the poll conducted of voters on their way into the voting, the cable networks called the contest for Trump before the actual caucus was even completed. It was a fittingly anticlimactic conclusion to a caucus contest whose result all year has never seemed in doubt. In part, that may have been because none of Trump’s rivals offered Iowa voters a fully articulated case against him until Florida Governor Ron DeSantis unleashed more pointed arguments against the front-runner in the final days.

    Trump steamrolled over the opposition of the state’s Republican and evangelical Christian leadership to amass by far the largest margin of victory ever in a contested Iowa GOP caucus. He drew strong support across virtually every demographic group—though, in a preview of a continuing general election challenge if he wins the nomination, his vote notably lagged among caucus-goers with at least a four-year college degree.

    Read: The end is coming for Trump’s GOP rivals

    The results as of late Monday evening showed DeSantis solidifying a small lead over former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley for a distant second place behind Trump. Even though DeSantis held off Haley, his weak finish after investing so much time and money in the state—and attracting endorsements from local political leaders including Governor Kim Reynolds—likely extinguishes his chances of winning the nomination. That’s true whether he remains in the race, as he pledged on Monday, or drops out in the next few weeks.

    Though Haley could not overtake DeSantis here, she has a second chance to establish momentum next week in New Hampshire, where she is running close to Trump in some surveys. But the magnitude of Trump’s Iowa victory shows how far Haley remains from creating a genuine threat to the front-runner. Her support largely remained confined to an archipelago of better-educated, more moderate voters in the state’s largest population centers.

    After the Iowa results, “she’ll be the alternative to Donald Trump,” said Douglas Gross, a longtime GOP Iowa activist who supported Haley. Her credible showing “is not because of organization or message, because she didn’t have either. It’s because she’s perceived as the alternative to Trump and the other candidates tried to be Trump.”

    Haley, though, clearly signaled her intent to escalate her challenge to Trump as the race moves on to New Hampshire. In an energetic post-caucus speech, she debuted a new line of argument against Trump, linking him to President Joe Biden as an aging symbol of a caustic and divisive past that American voters must transcend. “Our campaign is the last best hope of stopping the Trump-Biden nightmare,” she insisted, in a line of argument likely to dominate her message in the week until New Hampshire votes on January 23.

    For Haley, the first challenge may be reversing the gathering sense in the party that Trump is on the verge of wrapping up the contest even as it just begins. The behavior of GOP elected officials in the final days before the caucus may have revealed as much about the state of the race as the result of the first voting itself. Trump in recent days has received a parade of endorsements, including from Utah Senator Mike Lee, who criticized him sharply in 2016, and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whom Trump mercilessly belittled and mocked when he ran in the 2016 presidential race.

    Read: Trump is coming for Obamacare again

    As telling: Reynolds, the most prominent supporter of DeSantis, and New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, Haley’s most prominent backer, each declared in separate television interviews just hours before the vote that they would support Trump if he’s the nominee. Haley did the same in an interview on Fox: “I would take Donald Trump over Joe Biden any day of the week,” she told the Fox News Channel host Neil Cavuto on Monday, hours before she unveiled her much tougher message toward the former president Monday night.

    Trump himself revealed his confidence in a restrained victory speech Monday night that included rare praise of DeSantis, Haley, and Vivek Ramaswamy, who finished fourth and then dropped out of the race. Trump’s uncharacteristically sedate and conciliatory remarks suggested that he sees the opportunity to force out the others, and consolidate the party, before very long.

    Trump’s commanding lead in the vote testified to the depth of his victory. Results from the “entrance poll” of caucus-goers on their way to cast their votes underscored the breadth of his win.

    Across every demographic divide in the party, Trump improved over his performance in 2016, when he narrowly lost the state to Texas Senator Ted Cruz. This time, Trump won both men and women comfortably, according to the entrance poll conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations. He won nearly half of voters in both urban and suburban areas, as well as a majority in rural areas, the poll found.

    DeSantis won endorsements from much of the state’s evangelical-Christian leadership, but Trump crushed him among those voters by almost two to one, according to the entrance poll. In 2016, Iowa evangelicals had preferred Cruz to Trump by double digits. Trump on Monday also carried nearly half of voters who were not evangelicals, beating Haley among them by about 20 percentage points. In 2016, Trump managed only a three-percentage-point edge over Rubio among Iowa caucus-goers who were not evangelicals. (In both the 2012 and 2016 Republican presidential primaries, the candidate who won Iowa voters who are not evangelicals ultimately won the nomination.)

    Before Trump, the most important dividing line in GOP presidential primaries had been between voters who were and were not evangelical Christians. But on Monday night, as in 2016, Trump reoriented that axis: Education was a far better predictor of support for him than whether a voter identified as an evangelical.

    Trump carried two-thirds of the caucus-goers who do not have a four-year college degree, the entrance poll found on Monday night. That was more than twice as much as Trump won among those voters in 2016, when Cruz narrowly beat him among them.

    Other findings in the entrance poll also testified to Trump’s success at reshaping the party in his image. The share of caucus-goers who identified as “very conservative” was much higher than in 2016. About two-thirds of those attending the caucuses said they do not believe that President Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election. Rural areas that Trump split with Cruz in 2016 broke decisively for him this time.

    Yet amid all these signs of strength, the entrance poll offered some clear warning signs for Trump in a potential general election—as did some of the county-level results.

    Despite some predictions to the contrary, Trump still faced substantial resistance from college-educated voters, just as he did in 2016. In the entrance poll Monday night, he drew only a little more than one-third of them. That was enough to push Trump safely past Haley, who split the remainder of those voters primarily with DeSantis (each of them won just under three in 10 of them). But compared with the 2016 Iowa result, Trump improved much less among college-educated voters than he did among those without degrees.

    Trump’s relative weakness among college-educated voters in the 2016 GOP primary presaged the alienation from him in white-collar suburbs that grew during his presidency. Though Biden’s approval among those voters has declined since 2021, Trump’s modest showing even among the college-educated voters willing to turn out for a GOP caucus likely shows that resistance to him also remains substantial. When the results are tallied, Trump might win all 99 counties in Iowa, an incredible achievement if he manages it. But Trump drew well under his statewide percentage in Polk County, the state’s most populous; in fast-growing Dallas County; and in Story and Johnson, the counties centered on Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. (Johnson is the one county where Trump trails as of now.) Those are all the sorts of places that have moved away from the GOP in the Trump years.

    Also noteworthy was voters’ response to an entrance-poll question about whether they would still consider Trump fit for the presidency if he was convicted of a crime. Nearly two-thirds said yes, which speaks to his strength within the Republican Party. But about three in 10 said no, which speaks to possible problems in a general election. That result was consistent with the findings in a wide array of polls that somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of GOP partisans believe that Trump’s actions after the 2020 election were a threat to democracy or illegal. How many of those Republican-leaning voters would ultimately support him will be crucial to his viability if he wins the nomination. On that front, it may be worth filing away that more than four in 10 college graduates who participated in the caucus said they would not view Trump as fit for the presidency if he’s convicted of a crime, the entrance poll found.

    Those are problems Trump will need to confront on another day, if he wins the nomination. For now, he has delivered an imposing show of strength within a party that he has reshaped in his belligerent, conspiratorial image. The winter gloom in Iowa may not be any bleaker than the spirits tonight of the dwindling band of those in the GOP hoping to loosen Trump’s iron grip on the party.

    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Calls for a Cease-Fire—But Then What?

    Calls for a Cease-Fire—But Then What?

    The protest began with a prayer. Several thousand Muslims knelt in rows before the Capitol building yesterday afternoon, their knees resting on the woven rugs they’d brought from home. Women here and men over there, with onlookers to the side. Seen from the Speaker’s Balcony, this ranked congregation would have looked like colorful stripes spanning the grassy width of the National Mall.

    “We are witnessing, before our eyes, the slaughter of thousands of people on our streets,” Omar Suleiman, the imam who led the prayer, had said beforehand. “We are witnesses to the cruelty that has been inflicted upon our brothers and sisters in Palestine on a regular basis.”

    The prayer group was part of a demonstration hosted by more than a dozen self-described progressive and religious organizations to call for an Israel-Hamas cease-fire. After Hamas massacred more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians, in its October 7 attack, Israeli bombardments of Gaza have reportedly killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, the great majority of whom were also civilians.

    Peter Wehner: The inflection point

    Although the protest’s organizers spanned a broad spectrum of faiths and group affiliations, it appeared that most of the rally attendees were Muslim, judging by the sea of multicolored head scarves and traditional dress. But progressives of other faiths were there, too, waving the red, white, and green flag of Palestine. Rally-goers called for President Joe Biden and the United States to stop supporting Israel’s blockade and air assault on Gaza. (The first convoy of trucks carrying aid entered Gaza through Egypt this morning, the United Nations reported.) As I moved through the crowd, we heard speeches from Gazan expats and representatives of progressive groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, the Movement for Black Lives, the Working Families Party, and the Center for Popular Democracy.

    “Enough is enough,” Alpijani Hussein, a Sudanese American government employee who wore a long white tunic, told me. He and a friend carried a banner reading BIDEN GENOCIDE. Every time Hussein, a father of four, sees coverage of children killed in Gaza, he told me, he imagines his own kids wrapped in body bags. “I’m a father,” he said. “I can feel the pain.”

    For nearly two weeks, the world has watched, transfixed, as a litany of horrors from the Middle East has unspooled before our eyes. First, the footage from October 7: the tiny towns on the edge of the desert, bullet-riddled and burning. Parents shot, their hands tied. Women driven off on motorcycles and in trucks. The woman whose pants were drenched in blood. And approximately 200 people—including toddlers, teenagers, grandparents—stolen away and still being held hostage.

    Then, more death, this time in Gaza. The body of a boy, gray with ash. Rubble and rebar from collapsed concrete buildings or their ghostly shells. TikTok diaries from teenagers with phones powered by backup generators. “They’re bombing us now,” the teens explain, somehow sounding calm. Almost half of Gaza’s population are under 18; all they have known is Hamas rule—the Islamist group took over in 2007—and a series of similar conflicts. A barrage of rockets fired by Hamas and other militants; a wave of air strikes from Israel.

    But this time is different: Israel has never been wounded this way—October 7 represented the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust—and over the protest hung a frantic sense that the vengeance had only just begun. Hackles were up and, at one point, a police car drove by, sirens blaring. Two women near me clutched each other nervously, but the officer drove on without stopping.

    Conor Friedersdorf: A collection of narratives on the Israel-Hamas war

    Inside the Capitol, a plain consensus prevailed: Many members of Congress from both parties have opposed a cease-fire and expressed strong support for the U.S. providing military aid to Israel. But outside, things weren’t so simple; they never are. None of the people I met said they supported Hamas, and certainly not the recent atrocities. But many said that the violence cuts both ways. “Israel is a terrorist country in my eyes—what they’ve been doing to the Palestinians,” Ramana Rashid, from Northern Virginia, told me. Nearby, people held placards reading ISRAEL=COLONIZERS and ZIONISM=OPPRESSION. Many protesters told me they did not believe that Israel has a right to exist. At various points in the protest, the crowd broke into the chant “Palestine will be free! From the river to the sea!” (Whatever that slogan might mean for protesters—an anti-colonial statement or an assertion of homeland—for most Israelis it is clearly denying the Jewish state’s right to exist.)

    “A cease-fire is the minimum to save lives,” a D.C. resident named Mikayla, who declined to give her last name, told me. “But what we really need is an end to the occupation.” Leaning against her bike, she shook her head no when I asked whether Egypt should open its doors to fleeing Palestinians. “If Egypt lets Gazans leave the Gaza Strip, then that is the definition of ethnic cleansing,” Mikayla said.

    Other protesters I spoke with expressed concern only for ending the daily suffering of Gazans. The humanitarian crisis came first; the rest, the political stuff, would come later.

    Sheeba Massood, who’d come with her friend Rashid from Northern Virginia, burst into tears when I asked why she’d wanted to attend. It was important to pray together, she told me. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Muslim, if you’re Palestinian, if you’re a Christian, if you’re Jewish,” Massood said, “we are all witnessing the killing of all of these children that are innocent.” Everything else, she said, was politics.

    When I asked the demonstrators what might happen in the region, practically, after a cease-fire was enforced, most of them demurred. “I’m not a politician to know all the details and technicalities of it,” a Virginia man named Shoaib told me. “But I think just for one horrible thing, you don’t just go kill innocent kids.”

    Every person I met was angry with Biden. The president has been unwavering in his support for Israel since October 7, and in an Oval Office address on Thursday, he reiterated his case for requesting funds from Congress for military aid to Israel. That same day, a senior State Department official resigned over the administration’s decision to keep sending weapons to Israel without humanitarian conditions.

    Read: Around the world, demonstrations of support, grief, and anger

    In his remarks on Thursday, Biden spoke of the need for Americans to oppose anti-Semitism and Islamophobia equally. Friday’s demonstrators, so many of whom were Muslim Americans, were not impressed with that evenhandedness.

    “Mr. President, you have failed the test,” Osama Abu Irshaid, the executive director of American Muslims for Palestine, said from the podium outside of the Capitol. Ice-cream trucks parked nearby for tourists played jingles softly as he spoke. “You broke your promise to restore America’s moral authority.” Frankie Seabron, from the Black-led community group Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, led the crowd in chants of “Shame” directed at Biden. “This is a battle against oppression,” she said. “We as Black Americans can understand!” The crowd, which was beginning to thin, cheered its agreement.

    As is generally the case, the program went on far too long. After two hours of speeches, the enthusiasm of an already thinned-out crowd was waning. The temperature dropped and raindrops fell, gently at first, then steadily. Finally, after organizers distributed blood-red carnations to every rally-goer, the group began the trek to the president’s house.

    The demonstrators marched slowly at first up Pennsylvania Avenue, struggling with their banners in the driving rain. But as the remaining protesters got closer to the White House, the rain paused, and the sun peeked through the dark clouds. The protesters laid their flowers in the square before the White House gates—an offering and a demand for a different future for Gaza.

    Elaine Godfrey

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  • Why Biden Caved

    Why Biden Caved

    The White House and Congress have not made much progress in their talks to avert an unprecedented, and potentially calamitous, national default that could occur as soon as early June. But on the most fundamental point of dispute, President Joe Biden has already caved: He’s negotiating with Republicans over the debt ceiling.

    For months, the president’s ironclad position has been that the debt ceiling is not a bargaining chip. No longer would Democrats allow Republicans to hold hostage the nation’s creditworthiness and economic prestige. Paying the government’s bills by raising the U.S.’s statutory borrowing limit would be nonnegotiable. As recently as Friday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declared without equivocation, “We are not going to negotiate over the debt limit.”

    But Biden himself has dropped the pretense that his weeks-long budget discussions with the GOP have not revolved around the debt ceiling. Asked specifically about the debt ceiling on Sunday—in anticipation of a second White House visit by congressional leaders, planned for today—Biden told reporters, “Well, I’ve learned a long time ago, and you know as well as I do: It never is good to characterize a negotiation in the middle of a negotiation.”

    Read: This debt crisis is not like 2011’s. It’s worse.

    So there you go: It’s a negotiation. Exactly what the two parties are discussing is only starting to become clear. According to various reports, a deal to avert default could include some changes to permitting rules that would speed up domestic-energy production; a revocation of unused COVID funds; additional work requirements for some federal programs (although the president has ruled out any modifications to Medicaid); and, most significant, a cap on overall federal spending.

    The Biden administration still claims to be haggling only over the budget, not the debt ceiling. “The president has been emphasizing for months that he’s eager to have budget negotiations,” a White House official, who requested anonymity to explain the administration’s somewhat tortured position, told me. “That’s of course different from avoiding default, which is nonnegotiable.”

    Biden’s no-negotiation stance was born of past experience, when in 2011 Republicans dragged out debt talks with the Obama administration to the brink of default, resulting in a downgrade of the U.S.’s credit rating. But Biden’s approach this time is proving to be neither realistic nor sustainable, especially after Speaker Kevin McCarthy defied expectations last month by getting a budget-slashing debt-ceiling bill through his narrow House majority.

    Crucially, Biden failed to win strong support for his strategy from House centrists. Democrats had been hoping to persuade Republicans representing swing districts to buck McCarthy and help pass a debt-ceiling increase. But those lawmakers have stuck by the speaker. Complaining about a lack of outreach from the White House, they instead criticized Biden over his refusal—until recently—to negotiate. With Republicans unwilling to budge, Democratic centrists began to lose patience with Biden’s approach and conducted their own bipartisan negotiations.

    “We believe it’s very important in general that both sides sit down and try to work this out,” Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, the Democratic co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, told me before Biden’s first meeting last week with McCarthy and other top congressional leaders. “This can’t become a part of a political back-and-forth as the country drives off the cliff.”

    Read: “We used to be called moderate. We are not moderate.”

    Last month the Problem Solvers offered their own plan, which they presented as a fallback option that could win bipartisan support should Biden and McCarthy fail to strike a deal in time. The proposal would immediately suspend the borrowing limit through the end of the year to buy time for broader budget talks. If Congress agrees to unspecified budget limits and creates a fiscal commission to tackle the nation’s long-term deficits and debt, the plan stipulates that the debt ceiling would be increased through the 2024 elections.

    The compromise has yet to gain momentum, but its release seemed to undermine the Biden administration’s insistence that Democrats would not tie a debt-ceiling increase to spending reforms. “We didn’t try to fill in every blank, but we thought this was a really good framework to become the meat of the deal,” Representative Scott Peters of California, a Democrat who helped write the Problem Solvers plan, told me.

    It could still prove handy. Biden struck an optimistic note on Sunday, telling reporters, “I really think there’s a desire on [Republicans’] part, as well as ours, to reach an agreement, and I think we’ll be able to do it.” But McCarthy is sounding more dour. “I still think we’re far apart,” he told NBC News yesterday morning. The speaker said that Biden “hasn’t taken it serious” and warned that an agreement needed to happen by this weekend in order for the House and Senate to have time to debate and pass it by early June.

    Whether a Biden-McCarthy deal could even get through the House is also in question. Democrats have largely stayed quiet on Biden’s evident capitulation to Republicans, and the talks initially did not stir a backlash. But that may be changing as the president openly considers concessions that would be anathema to progressives, such as the possibility of adding work requirements to social safety-net programs. Still, the lack of a credible primary challenge to Biden’s reelection has helped give him room to negotiate, as Democrats fret about the effect that a default could have on the president’s already tenuous public standing.

    “As long as he continues to try to avoid default, and avoid the middle class having to pay the cost for it, then he’s in the position that the majority of the electorate wants him to be,” Jesse Ferguson, a longtime Democratic strategist, told me.

    McCarthy has much more to worry about. He traded away his own job security to win the speakership in January, agreeing to rule changes that would make it easier for hard-right conservatives to depose him. A debt-ceiling deal that fails to secure deep enough spending cuts or policy concessions from Democrats could threaten his position. “Default can be avoided. The question is whether Kevin McCarthy could withstand putting that bill on the floor,” Ferguson said.

    The speaker has secured no substantive commitments from Biden, nothing specific that he can sell to his party. But McCarthy has elicited one major concession from the president, which serves as a prerequisite for any others to come. Biden has come to the table with default in the balance, and he’s negotiating on the GOP’s terms.

    Russell Berman

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  • Somehow, the Science on Masks Still Isn’t Settled

    Somehow, the Science on Masks Still Isn’t Settled

    For many Americans, wearing a mask has become a relic. But fighting about masks, it seems, has not.

    Masking has widely been seen as one of the best COVID precautions that people can take. Still, it has sparked ceaseless arguments: over mandates, what types of masks we should wear, and even how to wear them. A new review and meta-analysis of masking studies suggests that the detractors may have a point. The paper—a rigorous assessment of 78 studies—was published by Cochrane, an independent policy institution that has become well known for its reviews. The review’s authors found “little to no” evidence that masking at the population level reduced COVID infections, concluding that there is “uncertainty about the effects of face masks.” That result held when the researchers compared surgical masks with N95 masks, and when they compared surgical masks with nothing.

    On Twitter, longtime critics of masking and mandates held this up as the proof they’d long waited for. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative outlet, quoted a researcher who has called the analysis the “scientific nail in the coffin for mask mandates.” The vaccine skeptic Robert Malone used it to refute what he called “self-appointed ‘experts’” on masking. Some researchers weighed in with more nuanced interpretations, pointing out limitations in the review’s methods that made it difficult to draw firm conclusions. Even the CDC director, Rochelle Walensky, pushed back against the paper in a congressional testimony this week, citing its small sample size of COVID-specific studies. The argument is heated and technical, and probably won’t be resolved anytime soon. But the fact that the fight is ongoing makes clear that there still isn’t a firm answer to among the most crucial of pandemic questions: Just how effective are masks at stopping COVID?

    An important feature of Cochrane reviews is that they look only at “randomized controlled trials,” considered the gold standard for certain types of research because they compare the impact of one intervention with another while tightly controlling for biases and confounding variables. The trials considered in the review compared groups of people who masked with those who didn’t in an effort to estimate how effective masking is at blunting the spread of COVID in a general population. The population-level detail is important: It indicates uncertainty about whether requiring everyone to wear a mask makes a difference in viral spread. This is different from the impact of individual masking, which has been better researched. Doctors, after all, routinely mask when they’re around sick patients and do not seem to be infected more often than anyone else. “We have fairly decent evidence that masks can protect the wearer,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown University, told me. “Where I think it sort of falls apart is relating that to the population level.”

    The research on individual masking generally shows what we have come to expect: High-quality masks provide a physical barrier between the wearer and infectious particles, if worn correctly. For instance, in one study, N95 masks were shown to block 57 to 90 percent of particles, depending on how well they fit; cloth and surgical masks are less effective. The caveat is that much of that support came from laboratory research and observational studies, which don’t account for the messiness of real life.

    That the Cochrane review reasonably challenges the effectiveness of population-level masking doesn’t mean the findings of previous studies in support of masking are moot. A common theme among criticisms of the review is that it considered only a small number of studies by virtue of Cochrane’s standards; there just aren’t that many randomized controlled trials on COVID and masks. In fact, most of those included in the review are about the impact of masking on other respiratory illnesses, namely the flu. Although some similarities between the viruses are likely, Nuzzo explained on Twitter, COVID-specific trials would be ideal.

    The handful of trials in the review that focus on COVID don’t show strong support for masking. One, from Bangladesh, which looked at both cloth and surgical masks, found a 9 percent decrease in symptomatic cases in masked versus unmasked groups (and a reanalysis of that study found signs of bias in the way the data were collected and interpreted); another, from Denmark, suggested that surgical masks offered no statistically significant protection at all.

    Criticisms of the review posit that it might have come to a different conclusion if more and better-quality studies had been available. The paper’s authors acknowledge that the trials they considered were prone to bias and didn’t control for inconsistent adherence to the interventions. “The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect,” they concluded. If high-quality masks worn properly work well at an individual level, after all, then it stands to reason that  high-quality masks worn properly by many people in any situation should indeed provide some level of protection.

    Tom Jefferson, the review’s lead author, did not respond to a request for comment. But in a recent interview about the controversy, he stood by the practical implications of the new study. “There’s still no evidence that masks are effective during a pandemic,” he said.

    Squaring all of this uncertainty with the support for masking and mandates early in the pandemic is difficult. Evidence for it was scarce in the early days of the pandemic, Nuzzo acknowledged, but health officials had to act. Transmission was high, and the costs of masking were seen as low; it was not immediately clear how inconvenient and unmanageable masks could be, especially in settings such as schools. Mask mandates have largely expired in most places, but it doesn’t hurt most people to err on the side of caution. Nuzzo still wears a mask in high-risk environments. “Will that prevent me from ever getting COVID? No,” she said, but it reduces her risk—and that’s good enough.

    What is most frustrating about this masking uncertainty is that the pandemic has presented many opportunities for the U.S. to gather stronger data on the effects of population-level masking, but those studies have not happened. Masking policies were made on sound but limited data, and when decisions are made that way, “you need to continually assess whether those assumptions are correct,” Nuzzo said—much like how NASA collects huge amounts of data to prepare for all the things that could go wrong with a shuttle launch. Unfortunately, she said, “we don’t have Houston for the pandemic.”

    Obtaining stronger data is still possible, though it won’t be easy. A major challenge of studying the effect of population-level masking in the real world is that people aren’t good at wearing masks, which of course is a problem with the effectiveness of masks too. It would be straightforward enough if you could guarantee that participants wore their masks perfectly and consistently throughout the study period. But in the real world, masks fit poorly and slip off noses, and people are generally eager to take them off whenever possible.

    Ideally, the research needed to gather strong data—about masks, and other lingering pandemic questions—would be conducted through the government. The U.K., for example, has funded large randomized controlled trials of COVID drugs such as molnupiravir. So far, that doesn’t seem to have happened in the U.S.  None of the new studies on masking included in the Cochrane review were funded by the U.S. government. “The fact that we never as a country really set up studies to answer the most pressing questions is a failure,” said Nuzzo. What the CDC could do is organize and fund a research network to study COVID, much like the centers of excellence the agency has for fields such as food safety and tuberculosis.

    The window of opportunity hasn’t closed yet. The Cochrane review, for all of its controversy, is a reminder that more research on masking is needed, if only to address whether pro-mask policies warrant the rage they incite. You would think that the policy makers who encouraged masking would have made finding that support a priority. “If you’re going to burn your political capital, it’d be nice to have the evidence to say that it’s necessary,” Nuzzo said.

    At this point, even the strongest possible evidence is unlikely to change some people’s behavior, considering how politicized the mask debate has become. But as a country, the lack of conclusive evidence leaves us ill-prepared for the next viral outbreak—COVID or otherwise. The risk is still low, but bird flu is showing troubling signs that it could make the jump from animals to humans. If it does, should officials be telling everyone to mask up? That America has never amassed good evidence to show the effect of population-level masking for COVID, Nuzzo said, has been a missed opportunity. The best time to learn more about masking is before we are asked to do it again.

    Yasmin Tayag

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