Backsliding Into Mask Mandates

The CDC wants us to go back to wearing masks indoors, even if you’ve been vaccinated. This is where I get off. 

If you’ll forgive a little testifying, I’ve tried hard to be reasonable throughout the pandemic. I’ve bent over backward to give public officials the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. This pandemic was a once-in-a-century calamity, and there was neither the living memory nor a readily available political playbook for how to handle it.

I didn’t lose my temper when health officials admitted they lied about the need for masks in order to protect the supply for health-care workers. Though I did lose my temper when some public health experts said that mass gatherings needed to be banned—unless you were protesting for racial justice. 

But I held off condemning New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s grave errors too harshly—chief among them, disastrously sending COVID-19 patients back to nursing homes—until it was revealed he lied about what he knew to protect his book sales and political ambitions.