Masks

Remember three years ago this month when shoppers were emptying supermarket shelves and locking themselves down inside? The masking of America was beginning — and for some it has never ended. On March 4, California’s governor Gavin Newsom terminated a three-year Covid state of emergency. His Department of Public Health will end mask requirements in medical facilities, prisons and homeless shelters beginning April 3. The nation’s official public health emergency will end on May 11. Blue-state and federal authorities are having a hard time letting go of the crisis. With the end of California’s rules, the city of San Francisco — bless its heart — has instated its own mandatory masking.

“Are you anti-mask?” “Are you anti-vax?” “Are you anti-science?” Employees of Levi Strauss & Co repeatedly pummeled me with these questions during 2020-2022, when I was the company’s brand president. Why? I advocated in defense of children: against the masking of toddlers, against closed playgrounds and youth sports, for open public schools. I’m not exactly sure what an anti-science person is. But that’s not me. I’m pro-science. And that’s why I’m anti-mask. Given the findings from the recent Cochrane study, a meta-analysis summarizing seventy-eight studies including a million people, the science is now clear: “Face coverings make little to no difference” in Covid infection and fatality rates. Even when the hallowed N95 is worn.

A great scourge has descended upon the land, leaving in its wake a path of misery and girlfriends shivering under blankets. Crops have been destroyed, and there are times when (after 5 p.m.) it can seem like we might never see the sun again. Yet the greatest terror ushered in by this darkness is its plague, a relentless onslaught of mild coughs and sniffly noses that seems to have left just about everyone feeling marginally annoyed. The ancients had a word for it, winter, and it's eliciting trembles of horror from the Cassandras over at the New York Times. New Yorkers, the Times recently croaked, "are living not just among the coronavirus and its seemingly endless variants, but a bunch of other viruses too." This "bunch" includes such baffling ailments as the common cold and the flu.

Don't call it a comeback. Prior to the 2022 midterm elections, there were signs that if Republicans had success, Covid would be roaring back with all its former aspects of fearmongering from the Democratic media complex, requiring more spending, more regulation and the return of rules Americans previously found anathema. This would serve the purpose of said complex in numerous ways: helping them push back against Republican efforts to end those supposedly "emergency" authorities and bureaucratic programs that now must find ways to sustain themselves. Everything from proxy voting to government vaccine requirements to the handwaving justification for the student loan bailout would be at risk, if the fiction that we are in the midst of constant emergency could not be maintained.

“Was it a mistake in so many states, in so many localities to see schools closed as long as they were?” an ABC reporter asked Dr. Anthony Fauci on October 16. His response: “I would say that what we should realize, and have realized, that there will be deleterious collateral consequences when you do something like that…” That was news to all of us parents who were called racists for raising the issue when it counted. For speaking of “deleterious consequences” during the height of the pandemic, we “open schools" parents were demonized and shut down. As the Chicago Teachers’ Union put it in a characteristic (but now deleted) tweet from December 2020, our push to reopen schools was “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.

The other night, I went to the Vermont State Fair in distinctly downscale Rutland, where my wife and I watched the pig races, ambled through the livestock exhibits, and examined the farm equipment, while enjoying corndogs and the crowd of distinctly overweight Rutlanders. The next day, I was back in my office in midtown Manhattan. A thin man wearing a mask got into the elevator with me and used a cloth to press the elevator button. Then he used the cloth to open the two doors to the street. He was clearly annoyed to have had to share the elevator with a maskless heathen. As he walked away, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen a single mask or Covid-crazed person of any sort at the Vermont State Fair.

Dr. Fauci has announced that he will retire soon — and Cockburn is popping Champagne. Anthony Fauci, surely the most (in)famous scientist in the United States, has decided to call it quits by the end of Joe Biden’s first (and hopefully last) term. As he departs from his monopoly on mainstream media health consultancy, he’ll pass go and collect a whopping $350,000 per year, the largest federal retirement package in US history. So cue up the in memoriam reel of everything that made the Fauci regime suck. While churches had to close starting in March 2020, somehow Fauci was OK with Tinder hookups. A year later, he waged a war on Christmas gatherings worse than the Grinch himself.

“Somebody had to say it,” and apparently that somebody is comedian Jim Breuer. In a set that broke Twitter over the July 4 weekend, Breuer came right out and delivered the news: vaccinations didn’t stop Covid. Mandates are stupid. Social distancing is meaningless. The entire Covid regime under which we’ve lived, to various degrees, for the last two-plus years is a worthless and sinister form of social control. Breuer’s twelve-minute routine on The Pandemic isn’t very good. His physical comedy doesn’t hit; the depictions of the vaccine are sloppy-looking, and he accompanies them with a dumb raspberry noise. His “Broadway musical” bit could be funny except that nothing he does resembles a current Broadway musical in the slightest.

No one is getting canceled, we’re told. There’s no such thing as “cancel culture.” It’s just consequence culture. People say racist, sexist, mean things and so they deserve to be fired from their jobs, stripped of their standing in society, shunned by their friends. Should Hitler have been able to keep his job after publishing Mein Kampf, huh? If only life were that simple. But mob rule is, by definition, imprecise. The people who get canceled aren’t really Hitler, of course. And somehow, actual criminals find themselves forgiven far sooner than regular folk who say something out of step with the narrow set of guidelines proffered by the worst, wokest people in society. Still, there’s something different about the people canceled for their Covid views.

I did not intend for this to read like a cautionary editorial. When the Spectator World asked me to do a piece on the BA.2 Omicron subvariant, I thought I would simply be updating readers on the progress of the latest Covid mutation. And while the BA.2 is fast spreading, it appears to be no more life threatening than earlier versions of the coronavirus. Virus-related hospitalizations in New York state and the rest of the Northeast, where the new variant is especially prevalent, have gone up slightly in recent weeks, but are nowhere near where they have been in previous Covid surges. And according to the data, those who contract BA.2 are not at a higher risk of serious illness. There is no indication that BA.

That was fast: the now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t, now-you-do masquerade in Philadelphia. Let’s review. On March 2, Philly, recovering from Covid hysteria, rescinded its indoor-mask mandate — masks off. On April 18, the city, alone among large American municipalities, rescinded its rescission — masks on (unless everyone working on-site and coming through the door was fully vaxxed). On April 21, the city rescinded its rescission of its rescission — masks off, for now. This latest experiment in masking left Cheryl Bettigole, the city’s health commissioner, explaining that Philly was only trying to “follow the data.

For a brief moment, America was the cheering mission control room in every action movie. You know the one: the flight controllers stand there nervously, waiting to hear from the wayward rocket. Then, suddenly, the radio crackles: “Houston,” says a voice, “this is Gemini One...we did it. A federal judge in Florida just struck down the mask mandate.” And everyone goes wild. From out of claustrophobic plane cabins and sterile airports this week came unlikely scenes of jubilation as passengers tore off their masks and breathed freely once again.

My wife and seven-year-old son were halfway to Boston to catch a connecting flight to Ireland on Monday when the news came down. Or, as it were, went up, as Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle voided the Biden administration’s widely reviled but recently extended mask mandate on public transportation. After receiving instructions from the ground, the pilot on their plane emerged from the cockpit and announced that masks were no longer required. He then invited the passengers to “go ahead and throw them in the trash.” There was a swell of cheers as the passengers and crew were overcome by a euphoria of deliverance from the tyranny of overzealous Washington.

The city of Philadelphia appears to be following China, if only in small steps, toward the delusional goal of Zero Covid. A new indoor-mask order, announced last week by Cheryl Bettigole, Philadelphia’s health commissioner, takes effect today, April 18. It’s the first resumption of such a mandate by any large city in the United States. President Xi Jinping, the well-meaning Dr. Bettigole most definitely is not. Yet is Philly, like China, again being seduced by the notion that the virus can be made to go puff? In Shanghai, a brutal push for Zero Covid is imprisoning millions in their homes and tearing infected children from their parents for quarantine.

At the start of this year, I took a flight from London to DC. For its duration, I wore a cloth mask that I had been given for free at a bookstore — the kind of mask that Most Experts now say does not meaningfully prevent viral spread. At one point, shortly after I’d finished eating, a tall male flight attendant asked me to pull my mask up — I, of course, did as asked. A few hours later, while the lights were dimmed and I was drifting off for a nap, my mask slipped to just below my nose, the same flight attendant tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a pamphlet from the airline.

This is a public service announcement from Cockburn: the mask mandates have got to go — for everyone’s health. Even America’s most progressive cities have lifted their face mask restrictions after the cresting of the first Omicron wave — but some of their denizens are hooked on the taste of government boot, and are going mad at the prospect of being weaned off it. Cockburn was sent a video by his nephew earlier this week showcasing this phenomenon: a masked Washington local cussing out unmasked teens at a DC Metro station. Masks are, for some unscientific reason, still required on public transport in the nation’s capital — despite not being needed in schools, gyms, stores, bars, restaurants…you get the picture.