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Could Masks Be a Crude Vaccine?
A new theory published in an opinion paper in the New England Journal of Medicine this week suggests that masks lead to less severe infections that still offer immunity. Elemental senior writer Dana Smith spoke to paper author Monica Gandhi, MD, MPH, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, about the benefits and drawbacks of using masks as a poor man’s vaccine, which types of masks are best, and why the U.S. doesn’t have a mask mandate. Here’s an excerpt of the interview:
Elemental: I’m fascinated by this idea of masks as a sort of variolation, or a stopgap for a vaccine. I’d love to hear how you came up with this theory.
Monica Gandhi: I’ve been really interested in how much asymptomatic infection there is with Covid-19. It’s very different from other respiratory viruses, or any other virus, where you can get totally sick or you can be completely fine. So I was trying to understand the risk factors for asymptomatic infection, and we started noticing that in any setting where masking was done, there’d be a lot of asymptomatic infection. In cruise ships, food processing plants — people got sick, they started masking, they didn’t get sick anymore. It really seemed to drive up the rate of asymptomatic infection from 40% as a standard to 81% on a cruise ship, 95% in jails, and 95% in food processing plants when they started giving…
