Politics, Not Science
The ugly truth about masks
MASKS, as Twitter wags have noted, are by now the equivalent of MAGA hats for Blue America. As washed-up child activist David Hogg put it last year, “I feel the need to continue wearing my mask outside, even though I’m fully vaccinated, because the inconvenience of having to wear a mask is more than worth it to have people not think I’m a conservative.”
Such statements capture an unfortunate fact about our society: We’re so politically tribalized that even our response to the pandemic says more about politics than about anything else. That’s especially true when it comes to masking.
In the early days, of course, it was the medical authorities who urged us not to wear masks. Virus guru Dr. Anthony Fauci told Americans that masks only benefit health workers and wouldn’t do much, if anything, to protect against casual transmission. Pundits and “experts” mocked thenPresident Donald Trump, who said that masks might help. How unscientific! A piece of cloth?
Those pieces of cloth soon became mandatory, as the apparent scientific wisdom flipped overnight (Fauci admitted that his original statement about masks was false or, at least, overdrawn, and mostly motivated by a desire to conserve supplies for health workers.) In very short order, anyone who expressed any doubt about the efficacy of masks in preventing the spread of the Chinese virus was mocked as anti-science and frequently censored for engaging in that neo-Orwellian crime of “spreading misinformation.”
The problem is that despite all the calls to “follow the science,” the science on masks doesn’t actually demonstrate that they are magic talismans against contracting or spreading COVID. In the right circumstances, they are modestly useful. Medical personnel who wear N-95 masks, gloves and goggles while tending to patients very seldom get infected (in fact, when they catch COVID, it’s usually at home, not at work).
On the other hand, the average person walking around Walgreens wearing a “face covering” made of cloth is mostly engaging in Hygiene Theater. Some “face coverings” even make things worse: The ever-popular fleece neck gaiter appears to do so, by breaking up exhaled droplets into smaller ones that stay in the air longer.
Surgical masks are somewhere in between: More effective than cloth, but not very effective for all that. And while masks themselves may do some good sometimes, mask mandates apparently don’t. A recent study conducted by a US Army medical team and published in the Southern Medical Journal looked closely at mask mandates in Bexar County, Texas, home of San Antonio, and found that the mandates didn’t help. Its conclusion: “There was no reduction in per-population daily mortality, hospital bed, ICU bed or ventilator occupancy of COVID19-positive patients attributable to the implementation of a maskwearing mandate.”
Nonetheless, mask mandates are a common response to COVID spikes (as are lockdowns, which the World Health Organization recommends against). They provide a sense that politicians are doing something, and they have become a tribal identifier for people on the left.
Wearing a mask lets you publicly proclaim that you take COVID seriously and, by its very visibility, lets leftists show their strength in many cities and neighborhoods, while identifying opponents for shaming and exclusion. (Hogg also commented about “very liberal area[s] where 99 percent of the people you see are wearing masks” — you don’t want to stand out as a Republican there!)
The very visibility of masking makes shaming easy, and I think many people are into masks as much for the shaming opportunities, or the fear of being shamed, as for any concrete benefit. That probably explains many of the people you see wearing masks while bicycling outdoors, or while driving alone in their cars, or in other circumstances where no reasonable person could think a mask offers any benefit. You pass a lot of people on a bicycle.
A more mature society, with a more responsible media and more sensible politicians, would address matters more rationally and less tribally. We do not live in such a society.