Stromata Blog

Thanksgiving Vacation

For Thanksgiving weekend, my wife and I drove to Los Angeles to attend Loscon, a regional SF convention to which we’ve become attached. On Thanksgiving Day itself, we visited Disneyland’s new “Avengers Campus” (ma femme is an enthusiast for Marvel movies), and I was reminded of Yogi Berra’s famous apothegm: “Nobody goes there; it’s too crowded.”

My attention has therefore been rather distracted for the past several days, but a few items leaked through.

• The weekend’s big topic, I gather, was the Nu Xi Omicron coronavirus variant, which inspired the stock market to fall out of fear that the panicdemic will intensify, even though the first reports suggest that it probably has less serious effects than previous variants. That is consistent with the commonsensical observation that viruses maximize their reproductive potential by becoming more infectious but less lethal. A virus doesn’t hate humanity. It just tries to survive long enough to spawn offspring, which it can’t do efficiently if it kills its host. There is strong reason to believe that the viruses behind past pandemics remain with us today as causes of the annoying but mostly harmless “common cold”.
• Egregious Xi-aspirant Jack Dorsey has resigned his positions with Twitter. I’m not such an optimist as to think that the platform will improve under his successor, who just last week gave an enlightening interview to Technology Review. What I infer is that Parag Agrawal sees Twitter as a conversational referee whose benign objective to ensure that discussion takes place solely within bounds determined by “credible sources”. Credibility will be determined, naturally, by the wise bureaucrats of Twitter Central.
• Dr. Fauxi leaped over the shark last Sunday. Did Aristotle or Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein ever proclaim, “I represent science”? Even Hyman Rickover had to be eased out eventually. Dr. Fauxi is no Rickover.
• By far the most ominous news report of the weekend was the Wall Street Journal’s “Taliban Covert Operatives Seized Kabul, Other Afghan Cities From Within”, an account of how the Haqqani Network established Fifth Columns throughout Afghanistan’s major metropolitan areas, activated them when Joe Biden announced that America was going to scuttle, and took control of the country with hardly a shot fired. That subversion could proceed undetected and unhindered for so many years is a blacker blot on the U.S. military and intelligence services than the botched withdrawal. If we don’t learn from this massive failure, it will inevitably recur.
• The Daily Telegraph hears “Whispers in Washington [that] suggest Joe Biden's camp has a plan to find a more popular replacement ahead of the 2024 White House battle”. The “plan” is supposedly to shuffle Cackling Kamala off to the Supreme Court when Justice Breyer retires. The whispers are, however, mere tintinnabulation. Should a Court vacancy occur before the 2022 elections, vacating the Vice Presidency would leave the Senate tied 50-50 with no tie breaker, which would spell the end of the Biden agenda. The chance that any Republican Senator will vote to confirm a replacement is about equal to the chance that Donald Trump will endorse Liz Cheney’s reelection bid. After 2022, unless the Democrats gain an actual Senate majority (a fading though not impossible prospect), Kamala will be unconfirmable as a Supreme Court nominee. Her qualifications for the bench aren’t just nil; they’re negative.
• A couple of noteworthy articles: In City Journal, Charles Fain Lehman explores “The Genealogy of Woke Capital”. National Review’s Kevin Williamson asks, “Enjoying Autarky?” and reminds readers of the vices of restrictive trade policies:

Some of you who went shopping on Black Friday may have noticed substantially higher prices, or found that certain products you were looking for were not to be had at any price. Some of you experienced the same thing when shopping for your Thanksgiving dinner. You have heard about “supply-chain disruptions,” which have made it difficult to get the world’s splendid produce to the United States with the ease and plenty to which we have become accustomed. Another way to think of that situation is that COVID-19 managed to do quickly what our anti-trade protectionists have tried to do slowly: deprive American consumers of inexpensive imports.

Finally, let me note that a small tax on unsolicited e-mails sent between the day before Thanksgiving and the following Tuesday would easily raise enough revenue to replace the income tax.

The Maskerade Continues

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control, garnered much attention a couple of weeks ago when she declared, “Masks can help reduce your chance of #COVID19 infection by more than 80%.” That would be remarkable, if true. As one commentator noted, Dr. Walensky evidently believes that wearing masks is more effective than Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine and not vastly less effective than Pfizer’s or Moderna’s. If that’s really the case, is it wise to spend billions of dollars on a mass vaccination program and to threaten those who aren’t vaccinated with the loss of their livelihood? No one has brought forward a scintilla of evidence supporting Dr. Walensky’s statement. She apparently just pulled it out of the air, knowing that the “fact checkers” would nod and go back to scrutinizing satires posted by the Babylon Bee.

Quite a few studies of the efficacy of face masks in protecting against Covid-19 have been published. You can find summaries of their results here and here. A news report summarizes the evidence thus:

Of 16 randomized controlled trials comparing mask effectiveness to controls with no masks, 14 failed to find a statistically significant benefit, the researchers said. And of 16 quantitative meta-analyses, half showed weak evidence of mask effectiveness, while the others “were equivocal or critical as to whether evidence supports a public recommendation of masks,” they said.

“The biggest takeaway is that more than 100 years of attempts to prove that masks are beneficial has produced a large volume of mostly low-quality evidence that has generally failed to demonstrate their value in most settings,” Dr. Jonathan Darrow, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and one of the researchers, told The Epoch Times in an email.

“Officials mulling mask recommendations should turn their attention to interventions with larger and more certain benefits, such as vaccines. Based on the evidence currently available, masks are mostly a distraction from the important work of promoting public health.”

Of particular significance is the absence of any support at all for the notion that cloth masks, overwhelmingly the most frequently seen have any beneficial effect at all:

One study (pdf) that’s widely cited by mask proponents, of rural villages in Bangladesh, found that surgical masks appeared to be marginally effective in reducing symptomatic COVID-19 but that cloth masks weren’t, Darrow and his colleagues noted.

But what most impresses me is that the Food and Drug Administration, which ought to know a bit about public health, disagrees, albeit quietly, with Dr. Walensky on the mask issue. The FDA divides face coverings into four classes in increasing order of protection: face masks, barrier face coverings, surgical masks and N95 respirators.

Face masks (“a product that covers the wearer’s nose and mouth”, without meeting any more rigorous standard) “are for use as source control”, that is, to limit the exhalation of disease-causing organisms by infected persons, not to prevent uninfected persons from breathing them in. That the typical cloth mask serves the latter purpose very poorly is obvious. Look closely at masked people near you (trying not to stare impolitely), and you’ll see that almost all cloth masks are worn in a way that leaves ample access to whatever may be circulating in the atmosphere. Then place your own mask tightly over your mouth and breath in and out. It is barely more difficult than ordinary breathing. Even a surgical mask “does not filter or block very small particles in the air that may be transmitted by coughs, sneezes, or certain medical procedures”. Only properly worn N95 respirators furnish that protection, which, as the FDA notes, comes with the drawback of obstructing normal breathing, thus posing a danger to sufferers from “chronic respiratory, cardiac, or other medical conditions that make breathing difficult”.

If someone has contracted Covid-19, it makes sense for him to wear a face mask in order to reduce the risk of passing the illness along to others. Since, however, only a minute percentage of the population is infected at any particular time, and those who are transmit it with far less than 100 percent efficiency, that isn’t much of an argument for universal masking. There are doubtless circumstances in which masks are a prudent precaution, but “authorities” like Dr. Walensky show no interest in distinguishing those cases from the rest of life. Someday, I suppose, they will propose to reduce falls by compelling everyone to walk with the aid of crutches.

The Concrete Begins to Crack

Perhaps the tiny crevices are appearing through which the grass of freedom can push through and ultimately demolish the concrete layer of panicdemic oppression. In Washington, D.C., whose local government is about as far from libertarian as one can find outside of the Chinese mainland –

Washington’s local mask mandate, one of the strictest in the nation since late July, will relax greatly beginning Monday, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) announced Tuesday.

The District had required residents to wear masks in most indoor settings since the delta variant caused coronavirus case counts to rise over the summer. On Tuesday, though, Bowser said coronavirus vaccinations are working: While case rates remain far above the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommended target of 50 new cases per day for every 100,000 residents, Bowser noted that vaccines are preventing most people who catch the virus from needing hospitalization.

That means it’s time to let residents choose whether to wear masks in their office buildings, retail stores, gyms and many other settings, Bowser said. Businesses can still require masks, but it will not be legally mandated – and some hope the change will help retailers struggling in a downtown that still resembles a ghost town most days.

Perhaps indicative of the motivation for this liberalization is a bracketed note that the online version of this story inserts immediately after the preceding paragraphs: “[Bowser is running for a third term as D.C. mayor]”.

A more ambiguous sign, but I draw hope from it, is the latest pronunciamento by America’s most famous celebrity doctor. As reported in the zealously pro-panic Guardian –

Anthony Fauci, the top infectious diseases public official in the US, said on Tuesday that if America further ramps up vaccination rates and those already immunized take booster shots that it is feasible Covid-19 could be reduced from a pandemic emergency to endemic status next year.

More than 70% of adults in the US are fully vaccinated. Fauci said if a lot more Americans take the vaccines, and if the US makes boosters available for everyone, the country could get control of the virus by spring of 2022.

It sounds to me like Dr. Falsi perceives the unrest among hoi polloi and hopes to appease it by promising liberation – someday.

“To me, if you want to get to endemic, you have got to get the level of infection so low that it does not have an impact on society, on your life, on your economy,” Fauci said.

“People will still get infected. People might still get hospitalized, but the level would be so low that we don’t think about it all the time and it doesn’t influence what we do.”

But at this point most of the “impact on society, on your life, on the economy” stems not from the disease itself but from the restrictions placed on society, lives and the economy in the name of containing it.

An Unexpected Call for Ending the Panicdemic

David Leonhardt writes a New York Times newsletter called “The Morning” that generally retails a conventional progressive line, yet he seems, judging by his column last Friday, to be weary of the way in which CCP Flu has come to dominate Americans’ lives. He asks, “Is it time to start moving back to normalcy?” and answers in pretty much the affirmative.

He reports the views of “one of the more cautious” of “the Covid experts I regularly talk with”, Dr. Robert Wachter, chairman of the medicine department at the University of California San Francisco. “He worries about ‘long Covid,’ and he believes that many people should receive booster shots. He says that he may wear a mask in supermarkets and on airplanes for the rest of his life.” Obviously not a right-wing Covid denier. Nonetheless, he –

also worries about the downsides of organizing our lives around Covid. In recent weeks, he has begun to think about when most of life’s rhythms should start returning to normal. Increasingly, he believes the answer is: Now.

This belief stems from the fact that the virus is unlikely to go away, ever. Like most viruses, it will probably keep circulating, with cases rising sometimes and falling other times. But we have the tools – vaccines, along with an emerging group of treatments – to turn it into a manageable virus, similar to the seasonal flu.

Given this reality, Wachter, who’s 64, has decided to resume more of his old activities and accept the additional risk that comes with them, much as we accept the risk of crashes when riding in vehicles.

After citing data indicating that “Covid now presents the sort of risk to most vaccinated people that we unthinkingly accept in other parts of life”, the author reaches a sane conclusion:

When The Washington Post recently asked Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, when the pandemic would end, she replied: “It doesn’t end. We just stop caring. Or we care a lot less.” She added, “I think for most people, it just fades into the background of their lives.”

I realize that answer may sound jarring, but the alternative – a society permanently dominated by Covid – is jarring, too. Eventually, the costs of organizing our lives around the virus will exceed the benefits. In some cases, we may have already reached that point.

The column links to an interesting page of graphs and tables, including a map showing, for every county in the United States, the average daily new CCP Flu cases per 100,000 people. The Centers for Disease Control has decided that a rate over 10 per 100,000 is dangerous enough to demand special precautions, and most of the country outside the Southeast is above that level. In my home county (Pierce County, Washington), it’s 30 per 100,000 as a I write. (The figures are moving seven-day averages and change daily.) If the disease were to move steadily through the county at that rate, each inhabitant could expect to fall ill at some point in the next nine years. That hardly conjures up images of the Black Death and makes one wonder why the CDC thinks the rate must be a third of that to be tolerable.

According to another of the site’s maps, one in nine people in Pierce County has so far suffered from CCP Flu; one in 988 has died of it. Bear in mind that the number of cases is most likely understated (because those who are infected by the virus but have no symptoms are counted only by happenstance) while the risk of death may be overstated. (As Mr. Leonhardt notes, “The aggregate statistics on Covid deaths and hospitalizations exaggerate the risk to most Americans, because a disproportionate share of severe illness occurs among people with specific medical vulnerabilities.” The Italian Institute of Health has found that only three percent of patients in that country who were suffering from CCP Flu at the time of death were free from other morbid conditions.)

Many Covidophobes have, I suspect, developed an addiction to the illusion of deadly peril. Just this weekend, I heard about a writer at a science fiction convention who complained vehemently to the organizers when a single unmasked individual appeared in the audience at one of her panels. The incremental risk that she faced as a result was undoubtedly too slight to be measured, yet it threw her into a simulacrum of fear.

I wish that everybody could remember that the world isn’t perfectly safe and never will be. It is much safer today than it was fifty, or even twenty, years ago. It is a minute fraction less safe than it was in December 2019. I’ll conclude with an observation by the author of an op-ed declaring that it is “Time to face hard truths and get on with life – virus and all”. In response to hostile comments, he wrote:

What really strikes me is how wedded many people are to having the epidemic and its restrictions last forever. What kind of mental illness is this? But I have made the point many times before that I have no intention of trying to change these people’s minds. This is belief and religion on their part, not data or science or logical analysis. I don’t even want to engage with these people. And they are a serious impediment to trying to get our society back to some kind of rational policy on the epidemic. Because they apparently have lots of time to spend writing idiotic and inane comments.

Thank God for 1776!

My direct paternal ancestor at the time of the American rebellion against Britain was a Virginia gentleman named George Veal. Unusually for his class, he was a loyalist. His neighbors seized his property, placed him under arrest and confined him to a jail, where he died. If he had foreseen the state of affairs recounted by Lionel Shriver in “The Most Frightened Nation”, he would, I am confident, have changed his mind about independence.

According to an Ipsos MORI poll conducted in July, an impressive 27 percent of Britons want to impose a government-mandated nationwide curfew of 10 PM – not then in force – “until the pandemic was under control worldwide,” which might be years from now. A not-inconsiderable 19 percent would impose such a curfew “permanently, regardless of the risk from Covid-19.” Presumably, these are people who don’t get out much. While 64 percent want Britain’s mask mandate in shops and on public transport to remain a legal requirement for the duration of the global pandemic, an astounding 51 percent want to be masked by law, forever.

There’s more: some 35 percent want to confine any Briton who returns from a foreign country, vaccinated or not, to a ten-day home quarantine – permanently, Covid or no Covid. A full 46 percent would require a vaccine passport in order to travel abroad – permanently, Covid or no Covid. So young people today would still be flashing that QR code on whatever passes for smartphones in 2095, though they might have trouble displaying the device to a flight attendant while bracing on their walkers. Likewise, the 36 percent who want to be required to check in at pubs and restaurants with a National Health Service contact-tracing app forever. A goodly 34 percent want social distancing in “theatres, pubs and sports grounds,” regardless of any risk of Covid, forever. A truly astonishing 26 percent of Britons would summarily close all casinos and nightclubs forever. Are these just a bunch of fogies who don’t go clubbing anyway? No. In the 16-to-24 age bracket, the proportion of Brits who want to convert Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London’s Soho into a community lending library, even after Covid is a distant memory, soars to a staggering 40 percent.

Far from yearning for their historic liberties as “free-born Englishmen,” eight out of ten of the British, according to a Southbank/Kingston University survey, were “anxious” about lifting any of their benevolent government’s copious pandemic restrictions. I’m not sure that you can call it Stockholm syndrome when captives don’t fall in love with their captors but with the state of captivity itself.

Miss Shriver has much more. To be fair, restrictions in Australia are more authoritarian than in Britain, but a not insubstantial number of Aussies at least protest, even if they haven’t yet stormed Canberra with stakes and torches in hand.

A Parable About Safety

There never was a more careful man than Hamilcar Wilts. Although the only river in his vicinity was two feet wide and looked badly in need of water, Hamilcar kept a rowboat on his roof in case of a flood. In the rowboat there was a raft, in case the boat leaked, and the raft’s equipment included needles for sewing furs, in case Hamilcar was carried to the far north, and an augur for opening coconuts, in case he was carried to the tropics. There wasn’t much against which Hamilcar wasn’t prepared.

Hamilcar banished all poisonous or inflammable materials from his home, and stocked his medicine cabinet with every potion known to man, including an ointment to treat butter slicer’s squint, which is a form of eyestrain affecting the pygmies who cut butter pats for restaurants. He filled his home with fire extinguishers, lightning rods and an elephant gun, and sometimes relaxed by sipping a sterilized glass of boiled beer. Within his fortress, Hamilcar felt safe.

Eight miles away, however, lived a dolt named Boggle. Boggle blew up his house one day while trying to open a can of gasoline with a blowtorch. The explosion threw him seventy feet into a warehouse of pillows, where he landed so gently that it barely knocked the ashes off his cigarette.

When Hamilcar heard the explosion he thought something had damaged one of his trees, so he quickly donned a pair of lineman’s gloves (in case of live wires) and a bee veil, hurried out to the yard . . . and was promptly crushed by Boggle’s plummeting stove.

The moral: The chances of getting eaten by a leopard on Main Street are one in a million, but once is enough.

When I was a boy, I acquired a paperback volume entitled Your Own Book of Funny Stories. My copy disappeared long ago, but “How Hamilcar Wilts Prepared For Everything And Got It” impressed me so much that I copied out the text. The author was Robert M. Yoder (1907-1959), a humorist who once competed with Robert Benchley, Richard Armour, Ogden Nash, Will Cuppy, James Thurber and their ilk. He also was the first to record (or mayhap invent) Willie Sutton’s famous explanation of why he robbed banks. (“That’s where the money is.”) Sic transit gloria mundi. He now has not so much as a Wikipedia entry.

I hope that the Yoder heirs won’t object to my having resurrected his narrative of Hamilcar Wilts’s inordinate quest for safety. It speaks, I think, to our present condition. (If they do object, I’ll gladly disgorge 100 percent of my profit from this republication of their ancestor’s work.)

What brought Hamilcar to mind was a timely article by John Tierney, “Keeping Fear Alive”:

Throughout the pandemic, American political and public-health leaders have been following Rahm Emanuel’s classic dictum for power-seeking officials: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Now they’ve adopted a corollary: you never want a crisis to end.

So they are prolonging the national misery instead of easing it, which could be done with a few simple strategies. Explain to the public that the virus will never disappear but is no longer a mortal threat to the vast majority of Americans. Encourage the minority still at risk to get vaccinated by honestly discussing who is in jeopardy and what scientists have learned about infections. Promote treatments proven to prevent infection and speed recovery while avoiding unproven treatments and mandates that cause collateral damage and generate mistrust. Above all, make it clear to Americans that we finally have reason to celebrate: what once seemed an unprecedented danger is now just one of many pathogens that we know how to live with.

But in the Wiltsian world, one never is willing to “live with” any risk, however limited and no matter what the cost of an incremental degree of safety. New Zealand has adopted the strategy of trying to shield itself behind an anti-coronavirus moat while locking down its populace for months on end. That “worked” for a time, but it could continue working only if the country either became a hermit kingdom like pre-Meiji Japan or used its interval of isolation to vaccinate its entire population. It hasn’t done the latter. “Only about 23% of its 5 million people have been fully vaccinated, the lowest rate among the 38 members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).” But even 100 percent vaccination probably won’t satisfy Jacinth Ardern’s quest for perfect safety. In the absence of an unfailingly effective vaccine, Covid-19 won’t disappear, and New Zealand will never reopen.

The Arderns and Faucis of the world think that anyone who isn’t Wilts is Boggle. What they miss is that both extremes are dangerous, just in different ways.

Further reading: Andrew Stuttaford, “Sweden, Lockdowns, and New Zealand’s Maginot Medicine”

Stripping Off the Masks

As I observed a few days ago, masks have become a talisman against Covid-19. Millions believe in their efficacy, even when wearing them in ways that provide ample entry to all passing viruses. I’ve taken lately to looking more closely at other people’s masks. Hardly ever do I see one that fully covers the nose and fits snugly to the cheeks. Almost none have the recommended two layers of protection.

But my observations aren’t compelling evidence. In City Journal, statistician Jeffrey H. Anderson looks closely at randomized control trials that have tested whether mask wearing in fact reduces virus transmission. His bottom line:

In sum, of the 14 RCTs [randomized controlled trials] that have tested the effectiveness of masks in preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses, three suggest, but do not provide any statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis, that masks might be useful. The other eleven suggest that masks are either useless – whether compared with no masks or because they appear not to add to good hand hygiene alone – or actually counterproductive. Of the three studies that provided statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis that was not contradicted within the same study, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than hand hygiene alone, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than nothing, and one found that cloth masks were less effective than surgical masks.

In all but one of these studies, it should be noted, the masked participants wore surgical masks, not the cloth masks that are ubiquitous today.

One RCT tested these masks that so many high-profile public-health officials have touted. This “first RCT of cloth masks,” in the trial’s own words (it is apparently still the only one), was a 2015 study by MacIntyre, et al. in Hanoi, Vietnam. A relatively large study, with over 1,100 participants, it tested cloth masks against surgical masks and did not feature a no-mask control group. The trial tested the protection of health-care workers, instructing them to wear a two-layer cloth mask at all times on every shift (“except in the toilet or during tea or lunch breaks”) across four weeks.

The study found that those in the cloth-mask group were 13 times more likely (2.28 percent to 0.17 percent) to develop an influenza-like illness than those in the surgical-mask group – a statistically significant difference. The trial also lab-tested penetration rates and found that while surgical masks were “poor” at preventing the penetration of particles – letting 44 percent through – cloth masks were “extremely poor,” letting 97 percent through. (N95 hospital respirators let 0.1 percent through.)

Evidence from randomized trials has been pretty much ignored by the Centers for Disease Control. It instead touts observational studies, which lack controls, have difficulty filtering out confounding variables and generally “are not only of lower quality than RCTs but also are more likely to be politicized, as they can inject the researcher’s judgment more prominently into the inquiry and lend themselves, far more than RCTs, to finding what one wants to find”.

It’s striking how much the CDC, in marshalling evidence to justify its revised mask guidance, studiously avoids mentioning randomized controlled trials. RCTs are uniformly regarded as the gold standard in medical research, yet the CDC basically ignores them apart from disparaging certain ones that particularly contradict the agency’s position. In a “Science Brief” highlighting studies that “demonstrate that mask wearing reduces new infections” and serving as the main public justification for its mask guidance, the CDC provides a helpful matrix of 15 studies – none RCTs. The CDC instead focuses strictly on observational studies completed after Covid-19 began.

With one exception, the studies that Mr. Anderson cites were conducted before the Covid-19 epidemic began. That, of course, is no reason to reject them. It’s scarcely conceivable that the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 is repelled by masks that are ineffective against other viruses. Moreover, the one post-Covid study is consistent with the earlier ones:

The only RCT to test mask-wearing’s specific effectiveness against Covid-19 was a 2020 study by Bundgaard, et al. in Denmark. This large (4,862 participants) RCT divided people between a mask-wearing group (providing “high-quality” three-layer surgical masks) and a control group. It took place at a time (spring 2020) when Denmark was encouraging social distancing but not mask use, and 93 percent of those in the mask group wore the masks at least “predominately as recommended.” The study found that 1.8 percent of those in the mask group and 2.1 percent of those in the control group became infected with Covid-19 within a month, with this 0.3-point difference not being statistically significant.

It’s now easier to understand why, in the early days of the epidemic, the medical profession, including the Centers for Disease Control, discouraged masks.

“Seriously people – STOP BUYING MASKS!” So tweeted then-surgeon general Jerome Adams on February 29, 2020, adding, “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.” Two days later, Adams said, “Folks who don’t know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus.” Less than a week earlier, on February 25, public-health authorities in the United Kingdom had published guidance that masks were unnecessary even for those providing community or residential care: “During normal day-to-day activities facemasks do not provide protection from respiratory viruses, such as COVID-19 and do not need to be worn by staff.” About a month later, on March 30, World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program executive director Mike Ryan said that “there is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any particular benefit.” He added, “In fact there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite” because of the possibility of not “wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly” and of “taking it off and all the other risks that are otherwise associated with that.”

There’s no need to accuse doctors of telling “noble lies” about the proper precautions against Covid. They were following what “the science” said. I’m not even sure that Dr. Fauci is telling the truth when he confesses to having intentionally misled the public. My suspicion is that he said what he sincerely believed at the time and lied later to disguise how seriously his revised advice clashed with the available evidence.

Masks and Magic

In some parts of the world, many people believe that magical charms can stop bullets. In the United States, there is an analogous widespread confidence that cloth masks repel viruses, whence have arisen the “mask mandate wars”.

And not just any old mask will do. Here is National Public Radio’s “health correspondent” telling us what he learned after consulting an expert on the aerosol spread of viruses:

So it can’t fit loosely, you know, leaving gaps on your cheeks or under your chin where the virus could sneak in, and it should pinch tight over your nose. And if you’re wearing a cloth mask, it should have a layer made out of special filter material, not just regular cloth. If you’re not sure, you can hold your mask up to the light to see if you can see pinpricks of light through it. If you can, then it’s probably not good enough. Or, you know, another thing you can do is spray water through it in front of a mirror. If water gets through to the mirror, not good enough. Buy a better mask or buy filters to insert between the cloth layers. And if you really want to protect yourself, you could consider double masking.[emphasis added]

As you look at the mask wearers around you with noses uncovered by the thin strips of cloth that leave roomy entryways for microscopic particles, ask whether this is any more practical than the advice (which I really heard early in the panicdemic) to wash your hands immediately after touching anything.

The handful of people who can and will do as the experts say are already vaccinated. Many of them have probably sneaked in third doses. As for the rest of he population, they might as well be wearing amulets containing the blood of a bat slain at midnight under a New Moon.

An interesting study suggests that a belief in magic to ward off bullets isn’t entirely dysfunctional.

In particular, protection spells cause actors to undertake actions that are not optimal for them as individuals, but are optimal for the society as a whole. This occurs because beliefs in protection spells lower the perceived costs of contributing to a public good (i.e. defending the village from invaders). Decreasing the perceived costs of contributing to a public good is beneficial in settings where the contributions levels would (in equilibrium) otherwise be lower than optimal. Because such false beliefs make the group better off, this offers a plausible explanation for why they persist in environments where intergroup competition is strong, like areas with intense conflict.

I’m at a loss to see any similar virtue to wearing masks as a protection against coronavirus. Mask mandates and mask Karens have, at best, distracted people from the genuine protection afforded by vaccination. At worst, they engender social conflict whose ultimate costs are comparable to, or worse than, a disease that kills a minuscule fraction of its victims.

Further reading: John Tierney, “The Panic Pandemic”

Since We All Must Talk About Either Masks or Simone Biles Today. . .

And I know nothing about Simone Biles. . . .

Being one of the handful of Americans who isn’t an expert epidemiologist, I don’t have much to say about the merits of the Center for Disease Control’s recommendation that everyone, vaccinated or not, in most of the United States (63 percent of counties, including practically all of the most heavily populated) return to wearing masks (which magically ward off coronaviruses, even when worn loosely or without covering the nose). Instead, I leave the commentary to Rochelle Walensky, M.D., the CDC’s director:

Information from several states and other countries indicates that in rare occasions, some vaccinated people infected with the Delta variants after vaccination may be contagious and spread the virus to others. [emphasis added]

Does that sound like a really firm, much less urgent, reason why vaccinated individuals should go back to the uncomfortable, dubiously effective and sometimes unsanitary practice of covering their breathing apparatus with cloth?

Dr. Walensky would have made sense if she had continued, “These tentative findings are an additional reason why people who have put off being vaccinated should delay no longer, but they do not necessitate any change to the CDC’s guidance that those who have been vaccinated may resume their normal lives – unmasked.” It tells you much about our strange time that she didn’t.

Scheduling note: Owing to the press of other work and my aversion to letting chatter about current crises dominate my life, I anticipate posting to this blog on Wednesdays and Sundays. If the mood strikes me, I may say something on other days, but probably not very often.