Biden’s call for “national mask mandate” has gained traction
WASHINGTON » As the nation heads into what public health experts are calling a “dark winter” of coronavirus illness and death, public health experts are coalescing around Joe Biden’s call for a “national mask mandate,” even as they concede such an effort would require much more than the stroke of a presidential pen.
Over the past week, a string of prominent public health experts — notably, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease specialist, and Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration under President Donald Trump — have said it is time to seriously consider a national mandate to curb the spread of the virus.
Overseas, President Vladimir Putin of Russia this week became the latest foreign leader to impose a national mandate for citizens to wear masks. Trump is opposed to a mandate, and Biden has conceded that a presidential order for all Americans to wear masks would almost certainly face — and likely fall to — a legal challenge.
Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, echoed the “dark winter” language during the most recent presidential debate and is already using his bully pulpit to promote and reinforce a culture of mask- wearing. If elected, he will almost certainly do more.
Biden has already said that, as president, he would mandate masks on all federal property, an executive order that could have wide reach. He could use his authority under federal transit law to require masks on public transportation. He could also prod governors who are resisting mask mandates to at least require masks in public buildings in their states.
But that is delicate political terrain in the
United States, where Trump has turned the act of wearing a mask — or not wearing one — into a political statement. Public health and legal experts say it would be far better for Biden — or Trump, for that matter — to use his powers of persuasion to convince Americans that covering one’s face to curb the spread of the virus is a patriotic or civicminded action.
“Instead of making it about the president’s coercive authority under law, it should be about whether the president can support a norm that supports public health, which is in people’s self- interest,” said Harold Hongju Koh, a law professor at Yale University and an expert in national security and human rights.
Trump, however, has shown little interest in supporting such norms. At a rally in Arizona on Wednesday, he mocked California’s mask mandate, saying, “You have to eat through the mask.”
Experts say there is growing scientific evidence that face masks can reduce the transmission considerably of respiratory viruses, such as the one that causes COVID- 19. Even when mask- wearing does not prevent infection, it can reduce the severity of disease by diminishing the intensity of a person’s exposure to the virus. Research also shows that states that have passed mask mandates have had lower growth rates of COVID- 19, beginning on the day the mandate was passed.
In a study published last week in the journal Nature, researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington estimated that “universal mask use” — when 95% of people wear masks in public — could prevent nearly 130,000 deaths from COVID- 19 in the coming months, although those numbers are based on certain assumptions and could change if people alter their behavior. Currently, just 69% of Americans wear masks, according to data gathered by the institute.
Even so, any hint of a sweeping federal requirement would “go over like a lead balloon” and “divide and harden areas of the country in opposition,” said Joel White, a Republican strategist with expertise in health policy. White said the Trump administration’s policy of letting state and local leaders decide about masks was “a far better way to go.”
But that has not produced the kind of compliance that public health experts say is necessary to reduce the spread of the virus. As of last week, 33 states and the District of Columbia required mask- wearing in public, according to a list compiled by AARP. But in certain parts of the country, especially heavily Republican states, resistance is deep — even when cases are soaring.
Many people in rural areas view masks as unnecessary for them because they do not live in crowded cities; in North Dakota, coronavirus cases are rising faster than any other state in the nation, but according to the University of Washington’s data, just 46% of North Dakotans are wearing masks.
Gov. Doug Burgum, a first- term Republican seeking reelection, is firmly opposed to a mandate, saying that although he favors wearing masks, people should do so out of “personal responsibility.”
During a visit to the state Monday, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, upbraided North Dakotans after a private meeting with the governor and business leaders.
“Over the last 24 hours, as we were here and we were in your grocery stores and in your restaurants and, frankly, even in your hotels, this is the least use of masks that we have seen in retail establishments of anyplace we have been,” she told reporters, according to The Bismarck Tribune.