I actually found masking very helpful. It was an easy way to tell the real scientists who actually put evidence over politics vs. those who were willing to go along with a narrative as long it served their political interests. The preponderance of evidence against masking effectiveness was so stark that it was obvious that the scientists who supported this were either incompetent or disingenuous. That's how I could tell the CDC had become a propaganda machine, because they produced nonsense "studies" like the Missouri hairdressers instead of running proper RCTs to actually determine if this was a viable intervention.