With COVID-19 cases rising in all 50 states over the past week, get ready for another round of politicized debates over mask mandates—even though vaccination is the actually effective way to combat the more infectious delta variant.
Anthony Fauci, the White House’s top COVID-19 adviser, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday that new masking recommendations were “under active consideration” within the Biden administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That’s just a few days after President Joe Biden suggested that the CDC could soon issue guidance telling children under 12—who can not yet get the various COVID-19 vaccines—to wear masks while attending school. The CDC announced in May that vaccinated Americans could stop wearing masks in almost all situations, but we may be on the cusp of yet another frustrating reversal in the official guidance.
FAUCI: Revising mask guidelines for vaccinated Americans is “under active consideration.” pic.twitter.com/J3DcZet6rt
— Carly Ortiz-Lytle (@intlcarly) July 25, 2021
Perhaps the most frustrating part is that Fauci, during that same CNN interview, acknowledged the reality of what’s driving America’s rising COVID-19 case counts. Spoiler: It has nothing to do with Americans ditching their masks.
“It is really a pandemic among the unvaccinated. So, this is an issue predominantly among the unvaccinated, which is the reason why we’re out there practically pleading with the unvaccinated people to go out there and get vaccinated,” Fauci said. “And since we have 50 percent of the country is not fully vaccinated, that’s a problem, particularly when you have a variant like Delta, which has this extraordinary characteristic of being able to spread very efficiently and very easily from person to person.”
But if this is becoming a “pandemic among the unvaccinated,” then mask mandates make little sense. As Reason‘s Robby Soave wrote last week:
Theoretically, if there are places in the country where vaccine rates are very low, people who obstinately refuse to become vaccinated might get some small benefit out of widespread mask usage. But in practice, people who don’t want to get the vaccine are unlikely to follow the other, more annoying mitigation strategies. On the contrary, the places that are most likely to reintroduce mask mandates and see widespread compliance are places where vaccination rates are very high.
In Alabama—which has the country’s lowest vaccination totals and (not coincidentally) relatively high numbers of COVID-19 hospitalizations recently—and in Louisiana, where case counts are approaching levels not seen since the winter, public health officials are running out of ideas for how to encourage the vaccine-hesitant.
“Many people here and elsewhere in the Southeast are turning down Covid-19 vaccines because they are angry that President Donald Trump lost the election and sick of Democrats in Washington thinking they know what’s best. State and local public health officials have struggled to combat that deep-rooted obstinance,” Politico reports. “The vaccine is a non-starter in communities where people say they do not trust the federal government.”
Once lost, trust is hard to regain. Decades of failed government policies have accumulated to make this mess. And public officials’ often contradictory edicts during the pandemic have not helped.
Let’s deny masks work, then mandate masks, then never differentiate between medical grade n95 masks & pieces of cloth, then mask only children for a bit, then reimpose universal mask mandates on vaccinated people and then ask why trust in institutions is crumbling.
— Zach Weissmueller (@TheAbridgedZach) July 23, 2021
In short: Another round of mask mandates issued from Washington is not going to end the pandemic in the rural South.
Are there circumstances where masks might still be helpful in curbing COVID-19? Sure. “If you’re around vulnerable people, if you’re taking care of a newborn or an elderly patient and you’re vaccinated and if you don’t feel well, you should probably get yourself checked out and not assume you’re impervious to any kind of infection even if you’re vaccinated,” Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, told CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday. “If you can get your hands on a KN95 mask or an N95 mask, that’s going to afford you a lot more protection,” he added.
It certainly makes some sense to take extra precautions when interacting with vulnerable people. And if wearing a mask all the time makes you feel safer or more willing to go about your normal life, by all means, do so.
But those two things can be true without justifying a return to mandated masking. At this stage of the pandemic, with safe and effective vaccines readily available for all Americans over age 12, there is no need for another round of public debates over masks, which were always temporary, less-than-perfect tools for combatting COVID-19.
This article was originally published on Reason.com. Read the original article.
Reason is the nation’s leading libertarian magazine. They produce hard-hitting independent journalism on civil liberties, politics, technology, culture, policy, and commerce.
