RUTHFULLY YOURS

This week, New York City finally made masks optional for children ages two to four in preschools or daycare facilities. They did so despite the fact that the ongoing requirement was clearly meant to be yet another inducement to get more people vaccinated for Covid, a disease that barely affects young children, and one they don’t spread as much as adults do. The vaccine-makers have had trouble showing worthwhile results in the youngest children, and in the meantime, many young children have acquired some immunity by getting sick with, and recovering from, Covid. New York City has finally given up on masks everywhere but on public transit.

The World Health Organization had never recommended masks for children below five years of age. The European Centers for Disease Control noted in its recommendations that young children have trouble wearing masks effectively, often drool into them, can easily become alienated from masked caregivers, and can suffer adverse social and developmental consequences from wearing them. Europeans trusted the science, and their children did roughly as well as Americans did. Better, in fact, because their school closures and disruptions were significantly less severe.

But in America, progressives trusted the science!, which is a very different thing. Mostly it’s about fear and neuroticism as a lifestyle choice, though occasionally it’s about using your child’s face as an anti–Ron DeSantis yard sign.

Not a single elected official in New York City or Los Angeles has ever even attempted to demonstrate with data that the policy of masking two-year-olds was achieving a public-health goal for the city that other people in their states, or in Europe, were foolishly forgoing. They don’t have to do this, because when you are trusting the science!, you don’t have to think or reflect on what you’re telling others to do.

Covid is now becoming something like red meat. It is a thing public-health officials wish they could eliminate entirely, but in the absence of this power, they just make absurd recommendations about it that nobody follows. You might say that this is “traditional public health” — the enterprise where progressive MDs vainly try to normalize wickedly unhealthy things, like puberty-blocking drugs and refined carbohydrates, while at the same time casting as evil normal, healthy things, like dried sausage or childhood innocence about sexuality. The CDC says never to eat medium-rare or rare steak. Nobody frets about this. Similarly, New York City’s public-health office recommends that every single person in New York City remain masked indoors. Nobody pretends to follow it.

But we haven’t gotten all the way there.

There are still places in America where Covid remains a source of restriction, shame, coercion, and collecting a full-time check for doing a crappy job. Places like the Newark School District. Or certain prisons and jails that have banned all inmate visitations since the beginning of the pandemic. Or maybe your school still has ridiculous, parent-morale-destroying rules about exposure. A local science-truster tests their second-grader every twelve hours and reports a positive test, and now your child has to stay home for five days, or ten days, or two weeks leading up to graduation, even though nobody has so much as coughed or popped a fever.

The pandemic was a legitimate public-health crisis, at one point. But along the way, as more people became vaccinated, and more people became infected with less-severe strains, it stopped being a public-health crisis and instead became a crisis for public health itself.  We road-tested universal house arrest and the mass use of “emergency use” drugs, and began talking about entire countries as if they were wings of a universal human prison, entering and exiting out of “lockdowns.”

The last remaining restrictions on normal life are a national embarrassment. We should be ashamed that any American children are being told to wear their cloth masks for their moving-up ceremonies. Lunatic people were often more right than the experts. And I’m ashamed I didn’t join the lunatics earlier. I’ll never forget it.

People talk about a coming Republican landslide election, built on frustration over the pandemic, inflation, and just the general omnipresent sense that the most neurotic, entitled idiots ever to walk the sward of earth took over every single power-exercising institution in the country.

Electoral vengeance would be sweet. At least for a few moments before you realize that a lot of elected Republicans are infected with brainworms, too. But I want truth and reconciliation.

New York City’s health commissioners should be made to explain what evidence they were using the last several months. They should be made to answer, in public, how many times they reviewed the data to justify their policy for treating kids in the Bronx differently from children in neighboring Westchester County. When they can’t produce much more than a few sighs or lying charts, they should be made to say the real reason: that they were serving an unreasonable constituency, the science-trusters they imagined to exist either in the city, or in their own department. They should be made to sit through presentations from another set of experts — the ones that can now, finally, be heard in the news stories about the mental-health crisis among children. They should be made to look upon what they have wrought.