Backsliding Into Mask Mandates
The CDC brings 2020 pandemic policies in a vaccinated 2021.
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.
I took the middle position on masks, criticizing extremists on both sides who tried to paint them as tyrannical impositions or symbols of moral superiority.
However, I was always pro-vaccine, which is why, despite my negative views of the Trump presidency, I always gave him ample credit for Operation Warp Speed, which brought miraculous vaccines online in record time.
So, with my self-indulgent celebration of my own reasonableness out of the way, I’m here to say that I’m done.
In a world without a vaccine, mask-wearing made sense. Even some of the lockdowns were justifiable for a while, not because the data supported all of them, but because there wasn’t any data available yet, and policymakers have an obligation to err on the side of saving lives.
Up to a point.
Yes, if you’ve been vaccinated, you can still die from COVID-19, but the odds are infinitesimally small. As my American Enterprise Institute colleague Marc Thiessen recently demonstrated in the Washington Post, if you’ve been vaccinated, you’re more likely to die from a lightning strike than from the virus.
But the CDC isn’t recommending mask-wearing to protect the vaccinated. It claims, without providing supporting data, that the vaccinated need to wear masks to protect the unvaccinated from the new delta variant.
Let’s assume the CDC actually has the data to support its policy. There are three primary arguments to require the vaccinated to mask up.
First, we need to protect unvaccinated adults, who account for nearly all COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations. There would be a good case for this if vaccines weren’t readily available. But they are. At this point, if you choose not to get vaccinated (without a medical excuse), I think that’s profoundly foolish, but that’s your choice.
Second, there’s the matter of children under 12 who still can’t get the vaccine. My heart aches for any child who dies from COVID-19—or anything else. Fortunately, the death rate for children is statistically miniscule. According to the CDC, of the more than 600,000 deaths from COVID-19, only 335 have been kids under 18 (and it’s unclear how many of them had significant additional health issues). According to the CDC, roughly twice as many kids die in car accidents every year. We don’t ban kids from cars.
The third argument, usually only hinted at, is that we need to keep COVID-19 from mutating into an even more dangerous variant that can defeat vaccines. This is a real concern. But masking and even lockdowns won’t prevent that. As best we can tell, the delta variant came from India. We could require Americans to wear masks and even get vaccinated, but that wouldn’t stop the virus from mutating somewhere else. And unless we want to ban global travel indefinitely, or until we vaccinate much of the planet (which we should do), we have to live with that possibility.
Meanwhile, there are real costs to backsliding back into masking and, heaven forbid, school closures, lockdowns, etc.—which some people are already agitating for. This stuff is terrible for kids, infuriating for adults, and (rational or not) profoundly disruptive of social peace and trust. The chief incentive for getting vaccinated—after protecting yourself and your loved ones—is the promise of getting back to normal.
Public health officials, who often do a terrible job of concealing how much they love driving public policy, are taking us in the wrong direction. We shouldn’t blithely follow them.
I'm going forward with exactly the same mindset as Jonah... but I have a bone to pick.
This is the second time, in the past couple days, that Jonah accuses public health officials of getting some kind of perverse ya-yas from telling people what to do. Sorry, pal, but that's baloney -- and it's worse for public health than any salty pork product that gets overly consumed.
Do we really need to do more to denigrate trust in our own institutions?
If the CDC didn't exist, I would wager that we'd want to create something very similar. But even if we totally killed the current agency, and started over, most of the "reforms" would involve symbolically catering to the emotional whims and bad faith of various partisan loons, which would be a stupid waste of time and resources. Any freshly created entity would still have to serve a populace that didn't agree on facts or reality, and would end up in the exact same boat it's in right now.
Can we please keep our anger directed at taking down the assholes, who are callously spreading lies, for profit and fame?
If there's one thing that the past year has taught me it's that mask mandates are pretty much bunk. If you have a properly fitted N95 mask on, then yes, that will absolutely help. The reality is far different. Everywhere I went there were loads of people with masks on their chin, their nose exposed, the sides of the mask puckered out, or all of the above. And most all non-95 masks are likely porous enough to allow virus particles to move freely.
If the CDC has lost trust it is because they, among others, have behaved in an untrustworthy manner. There's a price to be paid for telling noble lies and for treating adults as if they were children. They have been erratic and inconsistent in their recommendations, reversing themselves repeatedly. They have advocated policies that make reasonable yet vaccine hesitant people ask themselves why they should bother getting vaccinated. When they've been wrong, they haven't leveled with the American people, they just issue a new directive and insist people follow it. They have shown themselves to be in bed with the teacher's unions, promoting their agenda despite a dearth of evidence that children are significant spreaders of COVID. In fact, the evidence shows the opposite. In the UK last year had the kids in school & maskless, and it wasn't a problem.
Most importantly, our public officials act as if there are no consequences to these restrictions, or if so they are minor inconveniences. You get shut down if you try to suggest otherwise.
I'm 100% with Jonah here. I'm done altering my life for people who are too lazy or recalcitrant to get vaccinated. I'm especially done sacrificing the social & emotional well-being and development of my 4 year-old daughter. I bear those folks no ill will, but they're big boys & girls. They can deal with the consequences of their actions. The vaccine works, it's readily available, & it's free. Don't ask others to take care of you when you won't do so yourself.