Thank you to the Summit Daily for doing an important service and pointing out that the Stanford University study that formed the basis of the Terry Donze letter to the editor has been disavowed by Stanford. This is an important notation, and I hope everyone noticed it and then researched the study, which claims masks are not effective against COVID-19. If your readers did that, they would discover that the author of the study (Baruch Vainshelboim) is an exercise physiologist with no academic connection to Stanford nor to the National Institutes of Health. In addition, the journal that published the article is known to accept “radical, speculative and non-mainstream scientific ideas.” The proliferation of such fake news is a serious issue, and all of us need to be thoughtful and check out Snopes if something seems off-base. Not only did Snopes fact check this “study” and its claims but so did the Associated Press. From what I read recently, a retraction is on the way for this article.

Yes, Donze, the mainstream press did neglect that story because it deserved to be neglected!