The pandemic era is now, and mask bans are unethical.
The pandemic era is now, and mask bans are unethical.
Anti-mask was always a dark money campaign, fueled by business interests, and promoted by a partisan Republican agenda for right-wing virtue signaling.
Mask bans prohibit and inhibit use of respiratory protection that can prevent disease spread and protection from pollution inhalation, and banning or inhibiting that ability to protect oneself against the elements, coerces people, especially high risk disabled people, away from public engagement and participating in the community. This is a grotesque injustice.
WRAL - Protesters who wear masks or block traffic should face harsher penalties: NC lawmakers - A bill proposing harsher punishments against protesters comes as protests over the Israel-Hamas conflict have been staged on college campuses in recent months. The idea met no resistance in a state Senate committee Tuesday. May 7 2024 It has been a crime since the 1950s to wear a mask in public in North Carolina. But the state has also created a list of various exceptions to that law, which was expanded during the Covid-19 pandemic to include “any person wearing a mask for the purpose of ensuring the physical health or safety of the wearer or others.” Newton’s bill would delete that language, although he said he thought other state laws might still protect people who have a legitimate medical need to wear a mask. Newton told reporters he believes some people are exploiting Covid-era social norms of mask-wearing, as an excuse to hide their identities. “This isn’t just about the protests,” he said. “I think it’s clear people are seizing the opportunity to do things they’re not supposed to do, to break the law or to intimidate people, and keep their identities hidden. It’s time for that to stop.”
People wear respirator masks for a variety of health reasons. Allergies, infectious disease, air pollution, and when dealing with stirred up particulates. It is a fundamental life function for humans to avoid harm from the elements. Imagine banning winter coats, shoes, or blood pressure pills.
There’s no way to make a mask ban where you can seriously assume that “other laws” will protect disabled people from police on high alert, who may knock someone down, unmask and infect them, and then ask questions later, after it’s too late and the victim is dead of covid or has injuries sustained from police, and all because of being erroneously under suspicion for nothing more than being masked somewhere there’s a mask ban. How does one ask in advance for ADA accommodation in public spaces broadly? And how would that be managed bureaucratically and by what government agencies? And please let’s not bring up again the idea of pandemic buttons and having disabled people wear symbols of disability. Wearing sashes and carrying special dispensation papers should not be required to move about in society.
It should not be illegal merely to exist unassuming and practically anonymous in public anyway. “Papers, please!” is not really the mark of a free society.
Employers are getting away with disallowing employees from masking and protecting themselves — even if they have a family member at home who is in extremely fragile health, because rules in employment situations may only cover the employee, not their family members. It’s presumptuous and foolhardy to assume that there will be exceptions made for this situation elsewhere.
Merely wearing a mask is not enough to “keep identities hidden” anyway. We know that facial recognition software is not impeded by medical masks - and even dazzle is now ineffective from the latest iterations of computer identification capabilities.
If someone gets arrested, taken into custody, and booked, a medical mask isn’t going to prevent the police from learning the person’s identity.
I’m not worried about right-wingers wearing gaiters over their mouths and noses, because at least when they’re shouting it will hinder the distance their germs will go. And we know that masks are not what have hindered police prevention of violence, it was failures in leadership both at the January 6th insurrection and at the UCLA protests against the razing of Gaza.
Masking for medical reasons was politicized by Republican politicians in 2020 and refusing to mask has long been a conservative form of political virtue signaling one’s MAGA fealty to Trumpism. Republicans claimed that mask mandates were partisan political, and since we know their penchant for Accusation in a Mirror (“every accusation is a confession”), we can be fairly sure that mask bans are nothing more than conservative efforts at partisan political virtue signaling.
We know that anti-mask is part of the far-right Republican political platform. There’s been a business interest fueled right-wing anti-mask political agenda all along, because they believe masks “remind people of the danger” of infectious diseases and that danger leads many people to avoid certain economic activities like commuting to in-person office jobs and travel, which Republicans don’t like because their donors for example in the commercial real estate and the fossil fuel industry don’t like it.
The truth is that there has been a disinformation PR campaign to convince people that disabled people avoiding infection are the ones causing the covid problem. Dark money funded disinformation should not be the basis for threatening the health of people in the community.
Anti-mask was always a dark money campaign.
They believe that masks “remind people of danger” and thereby inhibit engagement in The Economy. There is evidence that the threat of disease does change people’s financial behavior. And it’s true that because humans are social by nature, we all look to others for cues.
People are not “engaging in the economy” as industry would like.
MarketWatch - People are ‘long social distancing’ due to COVID-19. Economists say that’s contributing to a drop in labor-force participation. By Zoe Han, December 2022 Knowing that COVID-19 has not gone away, some people are not yet prepared to let their guard down, according to a working paper distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Some 13% of U.S. workers said they will continue social distancing as the economy opens up and cases fall, and another 45% said they will do so in limited ways. Only 42% said they plan a “complete return” to the activities they participated in before the pandemic. The study, titled “Long Social Distancing,” estimated that unwillingness among workers to be in close proximity to others — which in many cases is prudent, especially for those who have underlying conditions or elderly relatives — reduced labor participation by 2.5 percentage points in the first half of 2022 compared with what economists would normally expect to see. That translates to $250 billion in potential annual output, representing a drop of nearly 1 percentage point.
News-Medical.Net - Older adults' social patterns shift post-pandemic, study finds Apr 10 2024 In one paper published in February in the journal Wellbeing, Space and Society, 60% of respondents said they spend more time in their home while 75% said they dine out less. Some 62% said they visit cultural and arts venues less, and more than half said they attend church or the gym less than before the pandemic.While that survey was taken two years ago, the most recent survey taken in spring 2023 showed similar trends, with more than half of respondents still reporting that their socialization and entertainment routines were different than they were pre-pandemic. In another paper titled "I just can't go back," 80% of respondents reported that there are some places they are reluctant to visit in person anymore. "The thought of going inside a gym with lots of people breathing heavily and sweating is not something I can see myself ever doing again," said one 72-year-old male.
And the marketing and economic research has been intensely scrutinizing all this human behaviour on economic activity since the start of the pandemic when they panicked about mitigations getting in the way of profits.
CMD - How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On Covid By Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch | December 22nd, 2021 Lockdown measures drove down cases in the U.S. and likely saved millions of lives globally. But the decline of in-person shopping and work, combined with factory shutdowns in places like China, disrupted the economy. A 2020 report from the corporate consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found the hardest-hit industries would take years to recover. One sector in particular that took a big hit was the fossil fuel industry. Oil demand fell sharply in 2020, placing the global economy on uncertain footing. Before long, business-aligned groups — particularly those connected to fossil fuels — began targeting the public health measures threatening their bottom lines. Chief among them were groups tied to billionaire Charles Koch, owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held fossil fuel company in the world. The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.
The business interests hire PR agencies that work harder and harder at convincing every last person to stop taking precautions and stop reminding anyone else of the pandemic. They tried ruthlessly to convince people to blame the disabled, elderly, and immunocompromised for the virus still circulating, but it’s too stupid to be believed by most, and even those who believe this nonsense are apparently unwilling to carry out violence in most cases. And I don’t doubt that some of these business interest operators hoped that would come about. The people pushing this disinformation must’ve known how dangerous this misconception could be when people would start blaming their kids getting sick on grandma not doing the herd immunity sacrifice voluntarily.
The business interests of course have lobbyists to push their interests by legislation as well. And now it’s at the point where they’re moving to outright bans, with no exceptions for personal safety respiratory protection, to make sure the last hold-outs don’t influence anyone else by either keeping them out of the public, or outright putting the most vulnerable in a position to be simply killed by infectious disease or air pollution.
Next they will find a reason to ban respiratory protection even in hazardous workplaces. Because that too will remind people of danger. They’re already failing to properly protect farm workers at risk for bird flu from cows.
STAT - Farmers resist push for workers to wear protective gear against bird flu virus By Sarah Owermohle May 10, 2024 Dairy groups say their members fear financial ruin if their cattle are found to be infected, and lawmakers, too, are increasingly concerned that H5N1 measures could chill the industry. There’s also the fact that protective gear is not ideal for hot working conditions such as milking parlors. “These workers have these fogged goggles all the time, which actually predisposes them to injuries,” said Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist and director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. “N95 [masks] aren’t necessarily working well when they get wet.”
There’s no reason they can’t make these working conditions different, so that PPE is more functional and comfortable. They just find any excuse not to encourage masks.
If this steamroller isn’t stopped, eventually there will be laws that ban all safety gear everywhere, out of fear that anything that reminds people of any danger at all is a threat to lucrative businesses. Asbestos, wildfire smoke, covid or ebola — we will be expected to consider all of it acceptable risk. The harm will be normalized and anyone complaining will be painted as “crazy” for being concerned.
This might seem alarmist. But think for a moment about unmasking the healthcare workers. What reason is there for healthcare at all but to heal people, preserve health, and preserve life? If the healthcare provider is just going to give the vulnerable patient covid by refusing to have healthcare workers wear masks, why even bother giving them life extending chemotherapy or surgeries to fix things?
Because money. Some healthcare procedures are lucrative. And the money rolls in even if the patient is hobbled for months, becomes permanently disabled, or later dies. And they’re laying it all out how the business interests want no regulation — it’s not a secret, they’ve published the agenda in a 900+ page how-to document for the next Republican president elected.
Obviously there will be backlash to catering to business interests this way for ugly profit. There will be expensive lawsuits, often leaving the taxpayers on the hook for the damage caused by immoral and bad decisions by leadership. Businesses will go under, and people might even go to prison when their unethical decisions are in the criminal territory. But this won’t be a deterrent. We know that none of these businesses ever operate with the long-term in mind. The decision makers don’t care what happens after they eject in their golden parachutes.
The human interest bottom line is that mask bans are an unethical political publicity stunt by Republicans at best, or it’s worse than that, and an industry business plot that will wreck human health in the name of profit. Mask bans will lead to sickness, injuries, and deaths, and it’s wrong to endanger public safety either way.
It’s absolutely sensible to react to a safety threat. To protect oneself against the elements.
When Mount Vesuvius erupted, about 2,000 people were pyroclasted into a grim posterity - because they were the ones who stayed behind while the other 18,000 or more people fled, in abject alarmist fear of the volcano. As a result they lived out the rest of their lives instead.
NBC News: Pompeii family's final hours reconstructed “75 to 92 percent of the residents escaped the town at the first signs of the crisis”
Sightseeing Tours Italy: Did anyone survive in Pompeii? “Archaeologists have determined from past documents and artefacts that there were around 20,000 people living within the city at the time of the eruption. From studying the skeleton remains, they estimated that around 2,000 people died in the eruption.”
We won’t ever know why the people who stayed behind in Pompeii did so, why they didn’t leave. Some may have been forced by employers to stay there and keep the economy going. But what we don’t ask is why the people who fled did so. It was the obviously preferable option for those who were able to.
And in the end, the need to protect oneself from respiratory threats is universal. Nobody is immune to wildfire smoke or air pollution, and according to the CDC’s evaluation, there is NO group that has no risk from infectious disease.
“I just wanted to point out that in Dr. Wallace's slide 22, half of the children who died had no underlying conditions. There is no group that clearly has no risk from COVID. And even children and adults with no underlying conditions can still experience severe illness due to COVID. And we're at a point now when vaccine and infection [inaudible] immunity is beginning to wane. We have these new variants that are emerging. We're all becoming more susceptible.”
- Sandra Adamson Fryhofer, MD at the CDC ACIP meeting September 12, 2023
"And they’re laying it all out how the business interests want no regulation — it’s not a secret, they’ve published the agenda in a 900+ page how-to document for the next Republican president elected." Pardon me! The battle against masks has been fought and won during the last 4 years of a Democrat presidency. It is impossible to call any party wholly owned by business interests "democratic." Almost all of my politically "blue" friends (and that means almost all of my friends, period) have become just as intolerant of masks as they used to be of those who refused to mask. The battle has been won by the uniparty.