Dr. Tracy Høeg tells Congress that the highest quality scientific evidence has consistently shown that masks do not work, school closures were not necessary, and six feet of distancing was not based on science:

"We've had evidence prior to the pandemic that masks were largely ineffective at preventing community transmission of influenza and other upper respiratory viruses, and we did not obtain any new high-quality evidence during COVID-19 that masks are an effective mitigation strategy.

We have several confounded observational studies, many of which were actually published by the CDC, that have severe flaws in them, that unfortunately led people to believe that masking children was going to be effective and necessary to keep children in schools.

But the highest quality data we have, for example, from a Cochrane review of randomized studies, has not found evidence that masks are effective. It wasn't science-based, and the six feet of distance was arbitrary... We should have by default kept our schools open, but instead, we required non-evidence-based mitigation strategies as a prerequisite for getting our children back into school."