UPDATE:
—Submitted by a reader
“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. 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.”
—John Tierney, a contributing editor of City Journal
I admit. I worry about what I’m about to convey. Because we’ve been screwed before.
Today’s read is from Joel Zinberg, M.D., J.D., a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an associate clinical professor of surgery at the Icahn Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and the director of Paragon Health Institute’s Public Health and American Well-being Initiative. He was general counsel and senior economist in 2017–19 at the Council of Economic Advisers, where he specialized in health policy. I include that lengthy bio because my guess is he knows what the Hell he’s talking about.
Here’s an excerpt from his piece:
Covid-19 cases are on the rise again in the United States. Even President Biden is infected. But the biggest danger is not the virus—the now-dominant and highly contagious Omicron BA.5 variant—but the risk that public health officials will overreact.
It’s always possible that enterprising officials could inflict more restrictive lockdown-type measures if cases continue rising. Yet no evidence exists that generalized mask mandates are beneficial.
Read the entire column here.
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