Going the Distance—Of Masks, Plexiglas and Floor Dots: Our blighted prospects, faces and places
The US response to Covid included mandated masking and social distancing imposed mostly by bureaucrats and public health officials shooting from the hip without any authorizing legislation or public hearings on the important questions of whether such measures would be efficacious and whether they would be worth the massive economic, social and human costs. Time proved those officials wrong. Worse, they knew better all along.
The most rigorous study of the efficacy of masks during the Covid epidemic was conducted by Cochrane, a highly regarded British epidemiological group that conducted 78 randomized controlled trials of over 600,000 participants in multiple countries. Its conclusion? Masking, along with physical distancing, air filtration and hand hygiene, makes “little or no difference in the spread of influenza or Covid-19-like diseases.[1] That conclusion, published in early 2023, is carefully qualified by caveats about unavoidable limitations of measurements of such moving targets.
But its conclusion is consistent with and buttressed by the evidence that localities or countries with mask mandates, six-foot floor dots, Plexiglas barriers and open schools fared no better than localities that did not require such costly, dehumanizing and alienating measures. To be sure, a google search will turn up many studies to the contrary, though none as comprehensive as the Cochrane review. So, too, we learned that the six-foot rule was conjured out of thin air with no respected study to support it—“it sort of just appeared that six feet is going to be the distance.”[2]
That the efficacy of these restrictions was fallacious was already well-known pre-Covid. As early as February 29, 2020, when Covid was just emerging, “Surgeon General Jerome Adams was telling Americans on Twitter to stop buying masks, saying they are “NOT effective.”[3] A pre-Covid article published in 2016 by the Canadian Medical Association Journal states that the widespread belief that “wearing a mask protects against the transmission of virus” is a “misperception.” It notes that in the 1919 influenza pandemic, masks were available and dispensed but “had no impact on the epidemic curve.” Noting that Canada did not recommend masks for well individuals, the article added that masks provide a psychological “false sense of security” and may be proffered by government despite their costs, supply chain externalities, and inefficacy to ameliorate the “real risk to a government unable to mollify its population.”
The 2016 article ends by noting that the real contagion is fear which “mines anxiety” in favor of a masking policy the dangerous epidemiological detriments of which are “masked by the surgical mask itself.”[4] This explains why the Surgeon General first said that masks do not work, and it was NOT science that caused the masking policy to flip as the winds blew at the CDC and throughout agencies from “stop buying masks” to costly, useless and damaging mask mandates. As NY Times’s Bret Stephens put it, “‘Do Something’ is not science and it should not be public policy.”[5]
In the Imperial War Museum in London, a small leaflet from the “League of the Man in the Street” sets out a bill of particulars of “irritating, unnecessary and useless restrictions” to which the British public had to submit during the fearful days of the First World War and the 1918 flu epidemic that followed in its aftermath. They include undisciplined government spending and taxation, loss of “personal freedoms … restricted in a way never imagined before,” closing of beaches, travel restrictions, censorship of letters and newspapers, closing or limited hours of operation of businesses, fines or imprisonment for breaking any one of hundreds of new regulations, and a widespread docile submissiveness to and restriction of freedoms long enjoyed by the British public.
The ineffectiveness of masking, distancing and other such measures were accessible to and well-known to health officials at the outset of Covid before fear fanned by those officials was allowed to grip the public imagination. Our public health authorities failed us in so many ways, chief among them by not allowing a more deliberative and informed process of legislation, debate, and uncensored science to inform these crucial decisions that did so much damage to Americans, and the most vulnerable sectors of our society—small businesses, schoolchildren, small property owners and the common citizen.
It is telling that the British “League of the Man in the Street” had the most insight to offer after the war and 1918 flu epidemic. The American “forgotten man” of Covid stands in those same shoes—overtaxed, run out of business, often deemed the essential worker, forced into the public workplace while the knowledge class sequestered themselves snugly at home behind their laptops—while bad and already long-discredited “science” mollified fears whipped up by public officials who knew better but went ahead and enjoyed their long sabbatical. Reckless, wasteful, and fraud-ridden spending poured salt into those wounds.
Edmund Burke rightly noted that “no passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” When those fears are inflamed by officials who know better, but are in a position to impose power, exert social control, extract money while systematically imposing censorship on an unrepresented public while the elite enjoy undeserved prestige and a long vacation, a public reckoning is in order.
[1] https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/full
[2] https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fauci-it-sort-of-just-appeared-that-six-feet-is-going-to-be-the-distance/
[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/01/886299190/it-does-not-have-to-be-100-000-cases-a-day-fauci-urges-u-s-to-follow-guidelines
[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4868614/
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/opinion/do-mask-mandates-work.html
April 10, 2025