Personally, I’m just fine with pulling the plug on the public transportation mask mandate. At the risk of sounding like a raging, bug-eyed Trump goober — or Bill Maher — masks, as a universal mandate have served what purpose they could and it’s time to move on into the next phase of COVID protection.
How the mandate has been ended is a whole other story. I am not alone in thinking it bizarre-to-appalling that in a highly-developed society of 320 million people one strategically placed partisan with precious little legal and no medical qualifications can dictate/induce a health policy for everyone. Really folks, WTF? Can we get some half-baked judge somewhere to require every pot hole in the country get fixed today?
(This on the judge from Charlie Pierce: “You see, Judge [Kathryn] Mizelle is one of those folks that the Federalist Society sent up the pneumatic tube that led from its labs to the White House. She clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and was rated as “not qualified” by the American Bar Association. She was 33 when she was nominated and confirmed as the 2020 lame-duck session was winding down. She was eight years out of law school and had never tried a case of any kind. Her husband was chosen to be acting general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security through his connection to that noted devotee of the Constitution, Stephen Miller. She had no experience, but she had the golden resume.“)
Have you read her argument on “sanitation”? What for godssake is the woman babbling about?
But the science of masked airplane travel has escaped me for a while. If every environment in which we spend time in close quarters with other humans was as well ventilated and filtered as an airplane I seriously doubt COVID would have spread as far and as deep as it has.
The larger point is that after two years, and after everything we’ve learned about the virus, after the vaccines and boosters and all that is readily knowable about transmission and individual vulnerability, we are truly at the point where it is up to each of us to protect ourselves. Pre-vaccine I wouldn’t have said so. But now I do.
Feel free to tell me how completely wrong I am, but two shots and two boosters later and with no underlying conditions (other than general mule-headedness and irritability) I’m not seeing myself as particularly vulnerable to serious infection from COVID as it exists today, even in its sub-variants. Likewise, based on my understanding, if I’m carrying any level of the virus, (which immunologically may actually help me avoid a more serious infection) my viral load isn’t potent enough to do much if any damage to another similarly vaccinated, otherwise healthy person.
Which gets us obviously to those who are either not vaccinated or afflicted with some other significant health problem.
At this point in the pandemic everybody has had enough time and has access to enough information to have made an adult decision about vaccinations. Not that “adult” means “good”, you undersatand.
For those still avoiding vaccination because of some utterly imbecilic hyper-partisan political reason (which usually covers both “religious” issues and athletes with “body purity” excuses) … well, good luck to you. If your fierce stand for “personal freedom” gets a tube jammed down your throat and an early grave, you can hope that Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis or Kristi Noem or some other sociopathic right-wing grifter will show up and say a few appreciative words at your funeral.
For people with emphysema, diabetes, etc., they absolutely should continue protecting themselves with masks in public settings. More to the point, they should have been doing that before COVID. It unfortunately comes with their territory.
For the rest of us, we’ve followed science, as opposed to cable TV entertainment theory, and have every good reason now to move on. Exercising, mind you, similar basic cautions we use to avoid harm from… well, pick as many as you like … spinal meningitis, hepatitis, diptheria, measles, strolling blind across six lanes of freeway, jumping out of airplanes without a parachute, French kissing Matt Gaetz … (sorry about that last one) … and on and on … and on.
Point being, there’s something out there somewhere for everyone, given the right circumstances and bad luck.
Life is like that.
Two problems: 1. It’s not only about you. You may feel safe without a mask, but you interact with other people, who interact with other people, who…you get the idea. Yes, your vaccinations and booster protect you from serious illness…but not from catching a mild case and passing it on to others, who may be less safe than you are. 2. If this ruling is allowed to stand, then what happens when we experience another big surge, or an entirely new pandemic with a new virus? Do we really want to strip the CDC of its ability to protect public health?
The “ruling” is partisan horseshit. We all can see that. The CDC should be the arbiter of when and when not to mask … at least a CDC that isn’t stocked with Trumpy sycophants. If another court strikes down this nitwit’s argument, well fine. But again — based on what I’ve read and have some sense of knowing — my airplane ventilation/filtration reasoning still stands. If the CDC, the government or the airline industry were truly intent on sealing off air travel as a vector for spread, they would have mandated proof of vaccines for boarding, not merely a face mask. They chose not to do that.
We’re mostly in agreement. I’d like to see this ruling appealed so that the CDC’s authority to protect public health is preserved in the future. This will be a long legal wrangle, and the current mandate is all but over anyway. I take your point about airplanes in flight being well-ventilated, though if you’re in the middle seat and the people on either side have one of the new variants, good luck. I’m also pretty skeptical that the mob scene at security is safe, not to mention the cattle chute of the jetway. Anybody who’s spent a half an hour sitting in a plane parked at the gate on a warm day can tell you about the ventilation in that scenario. As to your point about the immune-compromised taking care of their own safety and letting healthy people put up with mild Covid infections…if we want to shut down the continuing spread and evolution of new variants, then the fewer people there are walking around with Covid the better off we’ll be. Finally, now that we’re living with variants that easily skirt the protections of vaccination, masking remains an important layer of protection.
Well said, Bill.
I’m not troubled by the mask mandates ending. I’m very troubled about setting a precedent that the federal government can’t enact mask mandates whenever it sees that a lethal public health threat exists.
For that reason, for the future, I hope the ruling gets challenged and at least partially overruled. By the time a court challenge gets resolved, we’ll have very different COVID-19 environment, hopefully even better than now, so we won’t need mandates to come back.
I’m not at all sure that the Trump-twisted SCOTUS will partially or fully overrule. But I don’t think it’s impossible, and I don’t see the odds getting better in future years, unless there is something in the health records I don’t know. The federal government really needs the power to act in a hurry when a serious public health threat rises. They need that judicial precedent affirming that they have that authority.
Agree.
The number of these lone wolf rulings from partisan judges is through the roof over the past 10-15 years. A big slapdown of this one would be satisfying. But it’s not going to happen in a way that’ll change this particular ruling. If Congress was more functional, maybe we wouldn’t see as much of this nonsense. But I don’t see that changing for the better anytime soon. Nor do I see the current SCOTUS stepping in to rule against anything The Federalist Society calls “personal freedoms.” All that said, I still think it’d be interesting to see how much vaccination rates would change if the insurance industry/Medicare/Medicaid announced they were no longer covering COVID hospitalization for the unvaccinated.
Yeah, trusting the SCOTUS as final arbiter will do the proper, reality-based thing seems foolhardy tome.