uptick in COVID-19 hospitalizations and new viral variants, an international research collaborative funded by the National Institutes of Health is facing new scrutiny for how it came to publicly downplay its 17 years of research finding that masks make "little to no difference."

U.K-based nonprofit Cochrane, often described as the "gold standard" of evidence-based medicine, heavily redacted its internal discussions on how to respond to questions about alleged conflicts of interest that may have shaped its March statement deeming the systematic review's results "inconclusive" without changing its content.

It turned over largely unreadable documents to former Senate Finance Committee investigator Paul Thacker, now an independent journalist, in response to his request for the "personal data" Cochrane holds on Thacker under Article 15 of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation.

The State Department did roughly the same in a Freedom of Information Act production in August, prompted by litigation. It heavily redacted discussions of how to respond to reporters asking about its funding of a group that tries to starve conservative publishers of ad revenue.

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/nih-funded-research-collaborative-hides-emails-why-it-disavowed-gold