The Pivot to Forever Masking Is Starting. Let’s Kill It with Fire

We are reaching the point that many of us predicted and feared. The public-health community and media elites are starting to pivot to forever masking.

With vaccines now available for everybody aged five and up who wants one, highly effective anti-viral drugs on the horizon, the southern surge over, and COVID-19 settling into an endemic pattern, the justifications for maintaining masking requirements keep evaporating. So naturally, the masking obsessives are preparing new reasons to keep up the policy.

One sign is CDC director Rochelle Walensky. It was bad enough that she tweeted the unsupported claim that masks reduce your chance of infection by more than 80 percent (without differentiating the vaccinated from the unvaccinated), but it was also noteworthy that she added, “Masks also help protect from other illnesses like common cold and flu.” There is simply no reason to mention the cold or flu unless she is laying the groundwork for decoupling masking requirements from COVID-19. She was also not alone.

ABC News served up this dreck:

It linked to a story from contributor Jay Bhatt, a doctor and public-health professor, arguing that people should resist returning to normal after receiving their vaccine booster. But of the five reasons he lists for continued masking and social distancing, two of them are “it’s flu season” and “other viruses are out there.”

One of the reasons why I have tried to avoid making the argument that we don’t mask during flu season, so we should not be masking for COVID-19 given that vaccines are widely available, is precisely that I was always worried that at some point, somebody would respond, “Well, we should be masking during flu season!” It seems that moment has arrived.

True, there are just a few people hinting at this argument now and there is no formal guidance. But given the kind of goalpost-shifting we’ve witnessed in the past 20 months, and the compulsion with keeping people in masks no matter the science, it’s pretty clear where this is leading. We cannot wait around for public-health officials to declare that it is safe to go back to normal. These people will not provide us with an off-ramp, and so we must take one. We must ignore their guidance and put pressure on state and local officials so they do so as well.