To begin, the conventional wisdom of the worldwide medical and public policy community prior to Covid, embodied in various papers, studies and the like, was that there is no evidentiary basis that facemasks inhibit community transmission of airborne respiratory viruses. Examples of such papers include multiple pandemic guidance protocols from the CDC (2007 & 2017) and from the WHO (2019) among countless others. This was reflected in individual studies of facemasks in community settings during flu or influenza season or outbreaks, in meta-analysis studies (where the authors analyze a bunch of studies on one topic or question collectively to see if there is a discernible commonality among their various findings), and from historical observation (going back all the way to the Spanish Flu of 1918 where cloth facemasks similarly became a commonly used device that in retrospect failed spectacularly; though back then, unlike today, the doctors and scientists were honest enough to admit it). This was even articulated in a 2016 lawsuit in Canada where the judge ruled that hospitals could not compel nurses to wear facemasks during severe flu seasons due to the lack of evidentiary basis demonstrating facemask efficacy in inhibiting the transmission of the flu in any setting. This “paucity of evidence” remained a generally acknowledged fact even in most of the new studies conducted/written during covid in favor of public use of facemasks (as anyone who bothers to read the studies past the oft- sensational toplines and abstracts would see). During SARS-1, Australia actually threatened manufacturers of facemasks with massive fines for advertising that facemasks offered protection from contracting SARS. This stance was by no means controversial. Common sense indicating that a mask where the pores are hundreds of times larger than the size of a virion or that is not tightly fitted cannot possibly prevent the infiltration or exfiltration of virions once upon a time was, well, common.