On Monday, a federal judge in Florida overturned the Biden administration’s national transportation mask mandate, and public-health Twitter — and public-health-adjacent progressive Twitter, more broadly — reacted exactly how you’d expect them to. The cool-headedness, rationality and dispassionate scientific objectivity that we’ve come to expect from the expert class was on full display:

Now, what does the actual science — not The Science™️ — say about mask mandates? It’s pretty unambiguous. As John Tierney noted in City Journal earlier this week, a survey of the mask-mandate data shows “that the mask mandates made zero difference. The cumulative rate of infection over the course of the pandemic was about 24 percent in the mandate states as well as in the non-mandate states. Their cumulative rates of Covid mortality were virtually identical, too (in fact, there were slightly more deaths per capita in the states with mask mandates).” Tierney shared a graph of the data to illustrate the point:

Of course, Americans who want to remain masked are more than welcome to do so. It’s a free country — and it’s a freer one now that unscientific mask mandates are largely gone.