The Credibility-Triage Operation

W hen the Centers for Disease Control downsized its quarantine recommendations from ten days to five days in light of the Omicron variant, it did so with a little wink and a nod to the fact that public patience was running out. CDC director Rochelle Walensky explained that it “really had a lot to do with what we thought people would be able to tolerate.”

Well, tolerance is running out for other measures. And we are now seeing a last-ditch effort by Covid maximalists to save the credibility of the non-pharmaceutical interventions that did not work.

As the Omicron wave faded from New York, the state’s governor took credit for the success. “Mask regulations keep our schools and businesses safe and open, protect vulnerable New Yorkers, and are critical tools as we work to get through this winter surge,” Kathy Hochul said in a statement. “Thanks to our efforts, including mask regulations, cases are declining.”

But, of course, the mask mandate was instituted early in December, and the Omicron wave began to crash over New York a week later anyway. Neighboring states such as Vermont and New Hampshire had no mask mandates, and the same wave crashed over them as well. What seemed to make a difference in outcomes was the rate of vaccination. Nothing else.

The institutions most zealous to impose non-pharmaceutical interventions — elite colleges — also could not stop the Omicron wave from hitting their student and worker populations, although because these populations were young and overwhelmingly vaccinated, very few became seriously ill.

Public-health authorities, noticing that even liberal commentators are starting to urge the cessation of mask mandates that fall on young children, are trying to defend the United States’ Covid approach, which stands as a bizarre outlier in the Western world for the insistence on masking two-year-olds.

The problem with the above analysis is that it just isn’t true. European countries were less likely to mask young children because the European CDC wrote guidance at the beginning of the pandemic recommending against the use of masks for children under 12, citing the possibility of developmental, social, or psychological impairments they might cause children. The European CDC backed up this recommendation with existing literature. Nothing about European guidance tied school mask mandates to the rate of vaccine uptake in the adult population; instead, it was based on observations about transmission at schools, the nature of the virus, and child development.

But American doctors who cannot describe an off-ramp for childhood masking have to invent a reason ad hoc. If childhood masking were connected to adult vaccination rates, then at some point in the last year after the vaccine became available, a public-health official might have articulated this idea and even given an estimate as to when it would be safe. This never happened, however. Even now, there is no suggested off-ramp for childhood masking; it will be a political decision, not one driven by a public-health outcome.

As we get away further into the endemic stage of Covid, it will become clearer that non-pharmaceutical interventions were a way of outsourcing moral responsibility for the spread of virus to the public, which was already undergoing uncontrolled community spread. These policies had little support in science but were useful as a backhanded attempt to blame the public for failing to achieve the unachievable. We should not accept the blame for policies that public health knew would fail.