Schrodinger’s masks
To wear or not to wear a mask, that is the question for millions of Americans. And who on earth should the public listen to? —this also sounds like a hypothetical question.
That’s because health experts and politicians—ranging from Dr. Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky, head of the CDC, to Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and even Barack Obama—have kept sending clashing and inconsistent messages to a baffled public that have long been emotionally worn out by the pandemic.
If Anthony Fauci’s comment made on April 3, 2020, that “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask” was yet another miscalculation and underestimate of the severity of the outbreak, then more than one and a half years into the pandemic, experts and politicians should have learned better by now. They should have understood that wearing a mask is the easiest and one of the most effective ways to protect wearers and others from the virus. Alas, they haven’t.
Despite the simple fact that numerous studies have validated the effectiveness of masks in slowing the spread of the viruses—wearing a cloth mask alone can reduce transmission of exhaled droplets from infected wearers into the air by around 50% to 70%, according to a research study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association—American health experts and politicians alike have failed to send a strong signal that a mask is a must in public spaces.
In misleading and confusing the public on mask-wearing, however, Democrats and Republicans have at least reached a consensus.
On May 13, Joe Biden proudly announced that there was no need for the fully vaccinated to wear a mask. That premature message, which came as the vaccination rate in the U.S. fell short of Biden’s target, hadn’t been aired very long before the CDC decided to reverse course, saying fully vaccinated people should still wear masks indoors. Even as Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director explained that the rare breakthrough infections—cases in which the fully vaccinated still get infected—were behind the U-turn, the public wasn’t suddenly moved to become more vigilant, having already become frustrated and skeptical enough.
Some media outlets, like Fox News, in particular, have also spared no efforts to add fuel to the fire. They don’t seem to report vital issues like mask mandates from the standpoint of a fact-checker or a disseminator of scientific information; instead, they are all out to stoke public fears and anger that caters only to expanding their audience. In Fox News’ coverage on such issues, for instance, the mask mandate is often labeled as a practice of “meddling”, and titles like “Kids’ mask use ‘should not be forced,’ study authors argue”, “School board meeting gets heated as parents demand mask policy be dropped”, and “Betsy DeVos on escalating mask debate: ‘Leave these decisions to parents’”, etc., have kept popping up in the headlines.
Politicians, voters, and the media—they have already formed into a vicious circle, in which politicians vow to nullify mask mandates to play up to their voters; voters applauding the TV hosts who slam health experts for infringing on their “freedoms”, and the media cherry-pick a squad of political figures who chant the mantra of “no more masks”. A review of past and ongoing crises in the U.S. will often lead us to similar toxic circles, e.g., gun violence, immigration, health care, abortion, etc. But on the issue of mask-wearing, the bargaining is too trivial and the cost is too heavy. Red herrings like “masks could hinder kids’ ability to engage with each other” are often used as an excuse to object to school mask mandates, while anti-maskers often purposefully ignore the fact that school children, who are ineligible to get COVID-19 vaccines, might also pass the viruses to their classmates, friends and family members—the “liberty” and “freedom” the anti-maskers are wielding as weapons could result in other people’s confinement to the hospital bed.
Aggravating the CDC’s roller coaster mask guidelines is the persistent contempt for mask mandates in some COVID-stricken states as led by Republican politicians. On August 9, in the wake of record-setting cases in his state, the Florida governor ordered that Florida’s board of education withhold pay from superintendents and school board members who mandate face masks in schools, sending a strong signal that, even with skyrocketing cases and hospitalizations, his state won’t mandate mask-wearing in schools, one of the most vulnerable places for spreading the virus. On the same day, Republican senators Ted Cruz and Kevin Cramer proposed a series of bills aimed at banning mask and vaccine mandates, after Senator Rand Paul, who was suspended from YouTube on August 11 for claiming that masks are ineffective in fighting the COVID-19, introduced legislation to prohibit federal mask mandates on public transportation last month.
If public attitudes mutate too, the public body will have already developed its own resistance to the hard sell of masks and vaccines. Bombarded by three waves of outbreaks, American society should have, at least, thought thrice on their masking and vaccination strategies and concentrated instead on reversing the status quo. Instead, the U.S. has chosen to invest more of its energies into spreading conspiracy theories, such as the idea that the coronavirus was man-made and leaked from a Wuhan lab, in a bid to divert public attention away from the government’s own Waterloo in containing the domestic epidemic.
