The outbreak of the pandemic in early 2020 upended the world and sent governments scurrying to literally pull the plug on daily life arguing there was no other way to contain the spread of the pestilence.
This reaction largely emerged from the experience of the 1918 flu epidemic that killed an estimated 50 million across the globe. But the 2020 universe was a million years distant from the WWI world.
Between the burgeoning online jungle, the cornucopia of science research organizations, a gigantic pharma industry that immediately went on overdrive, and an army of “experts,” real and imagined, the battlefield instantly formed around “government mandates”
— i.e. emergency legislative measures quashing “inalienable” personal rights, leading many medium and small enterprises to extinction, causing tens of millions to lose their jobs, and redefining consumer behaviors that overwhelmingly favored larger to gigantic corporations, with the means to deliver goods to one’s doorstep within hours or days.
Mask mandates, in particular, stirred an unprecedented war across societies, with “pro-maskers” denouncing and demonizing “anti-maskers,” who quickly also rose as hardened “antivaxxers” as well. The latter did not remain passive; they responded with equal force via guerilla-type tactics and violent “days of protest,” resort to the courts, and political action initiatives.
This global disastrous anomaly is still very much in force and bitter arguments over “changing science” continue unabated (the term ‘changing science’ has already deteriorated to the level of a poor joke, but governments and experts have nothing to replace it with).
The latest, in this clash of (mainly online) arms, comes from the conservative Manhattan Institute’s City Journal online magazine. In an article titled “Wearing a mask may still give some people a sense of security, but they could breathe more easily if they’d face the facts,”
John Tierney, one of the City Journal’s contributing editors, suggests wearing a mask makes no real difference in trying to defend against Covid—and not so subtly aligns with the anti-maskers, but without taking the next step of dismissing the vaccines as unnecessary and, perhaps, even dangerous.
If you are an anti-masker this will give you plenty with which to defend your opposition to face covering. If you are not, the article is food for thought.
And don’t forget: our “experts” (all of them) are waiting for the next round of “changing science” to rekindle the Covid war of the trenches.
Maskaholics
Wearing a mask may still give some people a sense of security, but they could breathe more easily if they’d face the facts.
The pandemic has eased, but not the compulsion of many Americans to cover their faces. Fully vaccinated adults are still wearing masks on their solitary walks outdoors, and officials have been enforcing mask mandates on airline passengers and on some city-dwellers and students. (Though today’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle in Tampa, declaring the Biden administration’s mask mandate for public transportation unlawful, comes as welcome news.) Maskaholics in the press are calling for permanent masking on trains, planes, and buses. High school students in Seattle staged a protest demanding that a mask mandate be reinstated, and psychologists now deal with the anxieties of children who don’t want their classmates to see their faces. They’re suffering from “mask dependency,” as this psychological affliction is termed in Japan, where a long tradition of mask-wearing during flu season has left some individuals afraid at any time to expose their faces in public.
It’s a difficult addiction to overcome, according to the Japanese therapists who specialize in treating it—but a simple remedy might help some maskaholics. It’s a graph that should be required viewing for everyone still wearing a mask and every public official or journalist who still insists that mask mandates “control the spread.”
The graph tracks the results of a natural experiment that occurred nationwide during the pandemic. Eleven states never mandated masks, while the other 39 states enforced mandates. The mandates typically began early in the pandemic in 2020 and remained until at least the summer of 2021, with some extending into 2022. The black line on the graph shows the weekly rate of Covid cases in all the states with mask mandates that week, while the orange line shows the rate in all the states without mandates.