Face mask

Aspiring hermits Prince Harry and Meghan Markle retreated to the notably reclusive borough of Manhattan today to visit the One World Observatory and the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The not-so-royal couple were accompanied by Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York and Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City. But neither New York politician saw fit to don a face mask outside — nor did they ask their esteemed guests to. Instead, Hochul, de Blasio, his wife Chirlane McCray and their son Dante, bared their faces and posed up close for photos with the Sussexes in front of the gathered crowd. https://twitter.

Until recently, progressive elites had cornered the market in COVID irrationality. They shut down society to prevent one particular threat to human health, oblivious to the costs of that shutdown on the rest of human flourishing. They used a zero-tolerance approach to COVID risk, arguing that if lockdowns prevented just one death from COVID, as New York governor Andrew Cuomo insisted early on, the destruction of social and economic capital would be worth it. They inflated the toll that COVID was allegedly taking on human life, counting hospital admissions and deaths with COVID as hospital admissions and deaths from COVID. They hyped case counts as tantamount to death counts and refused to compare COVID deaths with other sources of human mortality.

Yesterday, the American Academy of Pediatrics released an embarrassment of a statement urging kids under 12, who can’t yet get the vaccine, to keep wearing their masks. AAP president Lee Savio Beers said in the statement, ‘Children under age 12 are not yet eligible for the vaccine, so it’s smart to be cautious and careful, especially when they are playing with friends, accompanying their parents to the grocery store, attending school or camp, and in any other situation in which they are around groups of people, some of whom may not be fully vaccinated.’ Notice there is no reference to a study or any data that supports the assertion that masks on children are at all useful. There aren’t any.

Since the early days of COVID-19, public health experts have been frequently wrong and unreliable. 'Trust the science' now sounds like a sarcastic joke. People want to know how long lockdowns and various mask requirements will last. When, or even if, they will get a vaccine. What about vaccine passports? The science doesn’t seem to know. So we listen to politicians. President Joe Biden recently shed some light by announcing that fully vaccinated people no longer have to wear masks indoors and outdoors, in most settings. Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis had previously weighed in with an executive order lifting all COVID-related restrictions statewide until a new law begins in July allowing him to overrule local governments.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2021 World edition. ‘The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime everything’s fine, take off your mask, forget it,’ said Joe Biden. ‘It still matters.’ Sorry, Mr President, I disagree. After more months than I care to count of rigorously strapping a face covering across my mouth and nose, I’ve decided to shed the mask. Now, after nine maskless days, I can say that I have never felt so sensible, so liberated and so, well, attractive. In fact, I cannot recommend it enough. I first shed the mask by accident after getting slightly drunk one evening. Who cares, I thought, as I hurled myself on to the subway.

Take me out to the ballgame, just not if I have to wear a mask. Major League Baseball is finally allowing a limited number of fans back into ballparks this year, but their nonsensical COVID-19 restrictions sap almost all the joy out of the experience. I recently attended my first game in almost two years at Nationals Park in Washington DC. (Before angry readers tell me I should be boycotting the MLB because of their decision to move the All-Star Game from Atlanta over Georgia's new election security laws, I'll have you know that I did not purchase the tickets). It was far from a celebration of the (far too slow) reopening of America.

It’s a day that ends in -y, which means there is some execrably stupid dust-up involving Tucker Carlson. Have you heard about Justin 'Definitely Not A Psychopath' Baragona? He possesses 52,000 tweets, 'spends most of his waking hours consuming cable news' and has one of the internet’s creepier fake smiles. He’s also tweeted about Tucker Carlson 29 times just this month. Wow, he sounds well-adjusted! Justin was the perfect kind of addict to spearhead the newest Tucker outrage spasm. https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1386837979453399049   Wait, that’s it? Tucker doesn’t like kids wearing the Face Diaper of the Beast? Who cares? But in the hyperreality of Twitter, Carlson’s throwaway venom was treated like a criminal offense. https://twitter.

To echo my friend Michael Warren Davis, I’m a big old centrist when it comes to masks. There are limits to my acquiescence, of course: the guy who yelled at me last week for not wearing one while jogging can go gargle with road salt. But generally speaking, if fogging up my glasses in public makes it a little less likely that even one person will contract the coronavirus, then I’m willing to do my part. The question is: is that good enough for the great Dr Fauci? These days, it can be hard to tell. Last week, our Hippocratic high priest got into a heated tiff with Sen. Rand Paul, a fellow doctor who was puzzled that Fauci was wearing a mask at their congressional hearing. Paul pointed out that Fauci had been fully vaccinated. ‘You want to get rid of vaccine hesitancy?

There are two women leaning against a railing overlooking the medieval armor exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on a Sunday afternoon. Both have shoulder-length, proudly gray hair, are resplendent in wooden jewelry and draped in clashing layers of flowing tapestry ranging from clay to marigold to topaz, some with vaguely ethnic-inspired patterning. The two women are in conversation, six feet apart down to the inch and laughing. They’re having a good time. The tableau is a sort of variation on a theme, an aesthetic we might call Santa Fe Art Mom and they are exactly the sort of person you’d expect, as they are, to be wearing two face masks, each.

We’re coming up to the one-year anniversary of shutting down and masking up. Since then, America’s governors have found themselves cast as one of two stereotypes. There’s the overbearing, schoolmarmish blue-state governor who loves to mandate masks and the freedom-lovin’, grandma-killin’ red-state governor who doesn’t. (Of course, most people ignored the fact that Gov. Andrew Cuomo was as ruthlessly effective at culling the elderly as he was at shuttering businesses in New York). These archetypes resurfaced this week after Gov. Greg Abbott lifted his Texas’s mask mandate, declaring his state ‘100 percent open’. California governor and passionate foodie Gavin Newsom branded the move ‘reckless’.