Maskerade

From The Conservative Review:

To suggest that individuals be forced into something so personal as covering their own faces indefinitely under the guise of protecting other people is a huge, dramatic change in the relationship between the government and the citizen. We should at minimum get clarity on these questions before allowing any executive authority to unilaterally decree it. Doesn’t the near-universal opposition to widespread mask-wearing from these very same “experts” before the issue became political hold any weight? Doesn’t their reversal demand explanation? 

To this day, there has never been a clinical study with randomized controlled trials in non-health-care settings that vouch for the effectiveness of universal mask-wearing in public. All we have so far are anecdotes and laboratory filtration studies, not real human-to-human studies. When asked about conducting one, Dr. Fauci said there is no intention to do so. In fact, he went from resolutely dismissing the idea of wearing masks in March to now telling a group of Georgetown University students that he couldn’t even conduct a study because he was so scared of having even a study group go without masks! 

Thus, we are told we are not allowed to breathe free air without a mask – no studies allowed. Fauci’s view? No votes, no hearings, no debate, no studies, no time limits, no performance benchmarks. Shut up and cover your mouth indefinitely and don’t you dare express the view he used to espouse … or else. (Read more.)

From Heather MacDonald at Imprimis:

The media have been equally uninterested in the scientific evidence regarding outdoor transmission. Coronavirus infections require what Japan calls the three Cs: confined spaces, crowded places, and close contact. The fleeting encounters on sidewalks and public parks that characterize much of city life simply do not result in transmission. And yet if you briskly approach someone on one of Manhattan’s broad and now empty sidewalks, the oncoming pedestrian may lunge into the street or press up against the closest wall in abject fear if you are not wearing a mask. You may be cursed at. 

The public health establishment has been equally complicitous in creating this widespread ignorance. It has failed to stress at every opportunity that for the vast majority of the public, the coronavirus is at most an inconvenience. The public health experts did not disclose that outdoors was the safest place to be and that people should get out of their homes and into the fresh air. Not coincidentally, the experts’ newfound power over nearly every aspect of American life was dependent on the maintenance of fear. (Read more.) 

From AIER:

Adam Smith explained empathy as a feature of the human personality. “As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel,” he wrote, “we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel like in the situation … By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments … and become in some measure the same person with him.” 

That’s what real life is like. But political life today seems to seek to banish that very human feeling. It’s as if they are playing a video game featuring all of us but we are mere figures on a screen programmed to do what they want. They have no obligation to understand us, much less worry about the pain they inflict, because, like figures on a gaming screen, we surely don’t feel pain at all.

And that is also how the media has come to talk of this calamity. Its numbers, charts, and trends, all highly alarmist and always with the same conclusion: the political class needs to impose more restrictions on us to make this virus go away. We sit helpless watching all of this unfold day after day, astonished that our rules could be so impervious to what has taken place before our eyes. (Read more.) 

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