The futility of mandatory masking now ripped bare

Picking the most stupid pandemic mandate is tough, but forced masking of hundreds of millions, despite a lack of evidence they work, must take first prize.

Mask mandates have given politicians a seemingly low-cost way of appearing to do something, even if they don’t believe in the health benefits themselves. Picture: Sarah Matray

In 1918 San Francisco proudly put its success in avoiding the first and second waves of Spanish flu, a virus people tended to die of, not with, to its strict mask mandate.

Then the third wave came and it ended up among the worst-hit cities across the rest of relatively unmasked California.

“They thought they had controlled it, stopped it. They were mistaken: the masks were useless … the city had simply been lucky,” John Barry wrote in his history of the period, The Great Influenza.

Our obsession with attributing the rise and fall in Covid-19 cases to government actions hasn’t changed through the years; indeed, it has become worse.

In December California Governor Gavin Newsom said sarcastically “What could go wrong?” when Texas and Florida, unlike his state, refused to impose new mask mandates to combat the sixth wave. Well, nothing did, relatively speaking. As any proper scientist would have expected, it made no meaningful difference.

Unlike Australia, where the states all have imposed much the same policies during Covid-19, the US became a humiliating laboratory for supporters of forced masking, providing endless case studies highlighting uselessness.

Picking the most stupid mandate of the pandemic is tough given the rich pickings: wiping down surfaces, multi-month school closures, plexiglas dividers, contact tracing – the list goes on. If these could be forgiven for a time, though, because of lack of previous evidence, the forced masking of hundreds of millions of people for hundreds and hundreds of days could not, and so takes first prize.

For a start, billions of useless plastic and cloth masks, often made with slave labour, have been spewed into the oceans.

Masks aren’t “better than nothing”, they’re worse. Unless the wearer enjoys flaunting their obedience, masking is costly. Non-verbal communication is obliterated, speech is muffled, glasses fog up, kids can’t socialise properly at school and they create a divisive atmosphere of fear.

No one has done more to highlight the futility of mask mandates during Covid-19 than Ian Miller, 34, an American data analyst in the entertainment industry who lives in Los Angeles.

His new book, Unmasked: The Global Failure of Covid Mask Mandates, is a rigorous demolition of forced masking that will shake readers’ faith in the intelligence of the population and the honesty of public health officials.

It includes many of the amusing charts for which Miller has become well known, showing the stunning irrelevance of mask mandates across nations, US counties and states, alongside the clueless forecasts of journalists and experts.

As Miller lays out, scientists including Anthony Fauci, who has became a masking champion, have known for a long time that masks don’t stop viruses.

“The typical mask you buy in the drugstore is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep(ing) out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you,” Fauci wrote in February 2020 in a private email later released under Freedom of Information requests.

“There’s no reason to be walking around with masks,” he told US 60 Minutes on March 8, 2020.

On March 31, Fauci received an email from a scientist at the National Institutes of Health, summarising the data from nine “diverse randomised control trials”.

“Bottom line: generally there were no differences … when masks were used,” the expert said, summarising the consensus among scientists and the World Health Organisation.

Yet three days after that email, on April 3, 2020, no time obviously for new evidence to emerge, Fauci and public health experts changed their view on masks, prompting a domino effect across the developed world: masks worked because we said they do.

Science became The Science, pushing the developed world into an egregious period of collective stupidity. It might seem intuitive that putting a piece of cloth over one’s mouth would reduce the chance of spreading disease. It also once seemed intuitive that the world was flat.

Twenty-two months later the dam is finally breaking. The Washington Post, which accused the state of Iowa of “not caring if people die” last year when it dared to remove a mask mandate, now concedes the bleeding obvious.

Last week a Bloomberg opinion piece said: “There’s no avoiding it: The benefits of universal masking have been difficult to quantify.”

Authoritarian health experts openly have started calling masks “facial decorations”.

Last week California, Delaware, New Jersey and Connecticut abolished their statewide mask mandates in quick succession. Walmart, the biggest US employer, did the same for its employees on Sunday.

Mask mandates have given politicians a seemingly low-cost way of appearing to do something, even if they don’t believe in the health benefits themselves.

Stacey Abrams, a Democrat candidate for governor of Georgia, drew national scorn last week when she sat down in the classroom for a photo opportunity, sans mask, among a group of schoolchildren in their masks.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s magnificently colour-co-ordinated cloth masks (the most useless kind) suggest the 81-year-old enjoys making a political statement more than staying safe.

For Democrats, they’ve become MAGA hats. For others, they are a class signifier, dividing low-wage service workers, who must wear them all day, with the rich, who rarely do.

Mask mandates have come at a cost of misleading and dividing voters too. In New York a father who refused to wear a mask was physically dragged out of a school board meeting last week.

Parents in the outer suburbs of greater Washington DC, where outdoor masking is still a badge of pride, are taking the new Republican governor of neighbouring Virginia to court for trying to make masking optional.

The extraordinary folly of this period will become clearer in time. People won’t be so trusting of health officials next time.