Masking is viciously ableist (Along with plexiglass barriers, social distancing - anything that drives people apart)
Masks don't demonstrate caring for others, they signal alarm, danger, & drive people apart. This hurts small children, those with dementia, the deaf and the disabled far more than they help.
What is “Ableism”?
Good one to have in your Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) quiver, right?
Like racism or sexism - it’s discrimination. And in the case of ableism, much like with racism or sexism - it can be overt (like, openly calling disabled people “gimps” or “retards”) or it can be subtle and systemic - that is to say, it can involve the creation and perpetuation of a system that actually effectively discriminates against the disabled.
I would say that the forever masking / forever mitigations crowd (and they do exist, trust me) are viciously ableist - as they are creating and perpetuating a system that keeps those with dementia, deafness, the developmentally and intellectually disabled, the communication disordered - perpetually confused, isolated, and cut off from the world around them. Some of them actually are aware of this, but because of their zero-COVID quest, hubris, thirst for power - they don’t care.
Others just are scared, propagandized - cowed.
So - let’s review where we are with masks and mitigations.
The Response to Mass Mask Exhaustion - “Mask Because you Care”
I’ve noticed a pattern in the endless-mitigations crowd on Twitter of late. I think they’re realizing that the world has gotten sick of masking and mask mandates. They’re realizing that the establishment kind of realizes that well, they’ve shot their wad and they can’t keep forcing people to mask their faces forever. So instead of mask mandates….
… the trope has become: do it because it shows you care.
So that’s it. It doesn’t matter that the data supporting public, casual masking (which is overwhelmingly a mix of procedure masking, cloth masking, and unfitted N95 masks, in that order) as a credible public health strategy is incredibly thin - particularly in this stage as the COVID pandemic transitions into it’s endemic state.
Even the infamous social worker turned uber-public-health officer of LA, Barbara Ferrer has declared that forcing masks back on people’s faces is a valid expression of concern for (apparently racial?) equity.
That’s right. If you’re against mask mandates, you might be racist. Anyways. Moving on.
The Initial Argument for Universal Masking Amongst the Healthy General Public
It’s actually pretty interesting how the argument and fight over masks has evolved. Initially - the argument was that the risk of asymptomatic transmission (that is, that anyone could be carrying it and spread it) necessitated the use of masking, even cloth masks, because, particularly initially, we were unsure of how COVID spread and given the initial estimates of the Infection Fatality Ratio (IFR) that was coming out of the data in China (somewhere north of 3-4% - which was scary indeed), the possible benefits outweighed the risks (because they were “just masks”). Finally - and as a corollary to the point about risk/benefit of masking - the idea of universal masking was justified initially because it was temporary - as in “two weeks to slow the spread” and “100 days the slow the spread,” etc., until we can get vaccines into people’s arms, and hospital capacity built out!
The Evolution of the Masking Argument
Obviously, these initial pro-masking arguments have largely fallen by the wayside. First - the IFR from COVID is sharply lower than the initial estimates from 2020 - and is sharply concentrated amongst the very old besides (which makes it actually rather similar to seasonal flu, or even the common cold).
Second - we now know how COVID is spread - it’s not spread via droplets (to which surgical masks or even cloth masks might offer some measure of protection) - it’s instead spread via smokelike aerosols that hang in the air for at times many minutes after a person has left the room (and given the fact that surgical masks and cloth masks do not meaningfully filter air - that means they are basically useless).
Third - and finally - because masking has clearly not been a temporary measure (particularly at hospitals and schools), simply brushing off masking (particularly mask mandates) as relatively cost-free seems to be superficial. After all - at my nursing home, my residents and nursing home staff have all been required to mask for going on three years now.
So to review: the above arguments that have fallen by the wayside:
masks are temporary measure (obviously not)
we think COVID is universally lethal so everyone should wear masks (yup, not the case here either)
and we don’t know how it spreads (but we do now)
and because masking will be temporary, the benefits (however small) will outweigh the risks (forever masking is a completely different matter)
The Pro-Mask Mandate / Forever Masking Crowd has not Stopped
So what have the pro-masking crowd done in response?
They’ve progressively and continuously exaggerated the benefits of masks many times over since early 2020. Initially, masks weren’t recommended by the CDC. Then they were. Then - the studies started coming out, like the “Bangladesh study”, the MMWR study - despite the serious problems with these studies (such as here, and as I note here), the hype-machine on casual public masking has became deafening - as if the last 100 years of scientific understanding on the usefulness and purpose of procedure masks never existed. So - no issue with concern about droplets vs. aerosols, and no matter that masking is now clearly no longer a temporary measure.
As it’s become clear that COVID is only dangerous to a small subset of the very old / very sick - they’ve pivoted towards the amorphous but scary-sounding spectre of “long covid.” This is one of the most insidious rhetorical shifts that’s taken place. Historian Phil Magness traced where it all started - the “Body Politic Wellness Collective,” which is accurately described as, well, a psychic crystal healing blog - through their advocacy efforts, have apparently convinced the Federal Government to fund well north of a billion dollars of research into a disease that at this point, no one actually knows actually exists as a distinct disease entity.1 Because “long covid” supposedly can be contracted even with mild or asymptomatic exposure - no longer does the actual facts about COVID’s lethality matter anymore. It is, as the activists say, a “mass disabling event” unless we all act, and act now (with more mask mandates & lockdowns, no doubt):
Finally, there’s this:
The Forever Masking Crowd has All it Needs
One of the most dangerous aspects of all of this, IMHO, is that it takes one of the most powerful ethical drives currently at play in American culture - that of empathy - and then weaponizes it. It doesn’t matter that none of this actually make anyone safer.
You have to admire them - they have a narrative they’ve constructed, using ideas like “protection” and “caring” and they have without question ruthlessly advanced it, to consolidate the power of the biomedical security state, or what Thomas Szasz used to call “the therapeutic state,” and to, in my opinion, completely re-engineer social life and culture.
As this happens - all of the concerns I have about forever masking become even more persistent and chronic as regards children and in particular, older adults in nursing homes. The most vulnerable, and the easiest to push around, the ones without a voice - the old, the disabled, the young, schoolchildren, etc. - they all suffer the most.
Make No Mistake - the Forever-Masking Crowd are the Most Ableist of them All
Given that the data on masking, particularly procedure masks is piss-poor (particularly in an environment where COVID is widespread and endemic), and given that those with dementia, hearing problems, and communication problems suffer the most from masking, particularly of a protracted nature - the fact is the forever-masking crowd, the pro-maskers, are the most viciously ableist of them all.
CALL THEM OUT ON THEIR ABELISM.
DON’T BE COWED. DON’T LET THEM BULLY YOU.
My nursing home patients have been largely ignored and avoided for the last going-on-three years now. As I’ve mentioned before - the fact there is no exit ramp for forever masking, forever NPIs and social distancing for them - that condemns them to a much worse fate than I ever would have counted on when I started the nursing home business.
We used to say that the goal of nursing homes was to be “home like.” Well, unless you have an ankle monitor on your leg and a sign on your door warning the public away from you, nursing homes are condemned to be prisons, not homes.
Wanted to say - as someone who’s worked in nursing homes and around and with the chronically ill and infirm, I have no problem with the idea that any respiratory illness of sufficient severity can cause chronic and lasting symptoms - I see it all the time in my nursing home patients. What is being proposed with the so-called “long covid” idea though is something radically different, and for no good reason other than convenient politics.
You have inspired me to stop being compliant and silent. I am posting this draft of an open letter to the governing 'bodies' of a Boston area library.
Masking and the Public Library: An Open Letter
“The history of libraries serving people with disabilities is long and distinguished. Libraries were often the first social or government institutions in many communities across the nation to recognize the humanity of people with disabilities and provide services to promote their rights and equality….”
“In 1897, when the Library of Congress opened its reading room for the blind, some public libraries, school libraries, and library consortia had already been building collections of materials in alternate formats for about 50 years. The establishment in 1906 of the American Library Association’s (ALA) first committee for services to people with disabilities cemented the national leadership of libraries in the struggle for inclusion of persons with disabilities…”
“These developments in librarianship occurred before people with disabilities had gained many basic rights in many other contexts, from the right to have an education or employment to even the right to go outside at certain times of day in communities that had what were known as ‘ugly laws’.”
https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/ada-inclusion-in-libraries/
“Ugly”: unwanted, unimportant, an unclean viral vector. That is how the Plexiglas and threatening masked, faceless figures of librarians make me feel at the ---- Public Library, a place I once cherished as a home away from home, an essential link to a community of neighbors.
Now, as I enter the library, I feel it for the first time-- can no longer escape the cruel ‘truth’ that only a couple of years ago I was able to brush off and cope with. I feel the full humiliation now. Invisible, old, deaf, partially blind. Helpless and alone. Handicapped and unwanted. I suppose it’s been true on some level for a long time, but now I know it and it feels each time like a punch in the gut. I know each time that any interaction with a librarian in a mask will be completely unintelligible, the sound muffled by fabric and Plexiglas, the faces and lips unreadable, unknowable. My incomprehension met with a shrug. Not a single smile greets me. The library has become, for me, a profoundly lonely and inaccessible place.
Abelism is defined as discrimination in favor of able-bodied people, and like racism and sexism, it can be systemic involving the perpetuation of systems and practices that effectively discriminate against the handicapped. As one gerontologist who serves nursing home residents put it, “I would say that the forever masking …crowd…are viciously ableist - as they are creating and perpetuating a system that keeps those with dementia, deafness, the developmentally and intellectually disabled, the communication disordered - perpetually confused, isolated, and cut off from the world around them. “
https://gerodoc.substack.com/p/masking-is-viciously-abelist-along?utm_medium=ios
After nearly three years of circulation SarsCoV2 is no longer novel—it is fully endemic and it will be so for generations to come. It has joined four other endemic human corona viruses (HCoV-OC43, -229E, -NL63 and -HKU1), which also cause upper and lower respiratory tract infections. HCoVs are globally distributed and the predominant species may vary by region or year. Like all RNA viruses, corona viruses mutate rapidly and active infections ebb and flow with the seasons causing symptoms which range from mild transient colds to more severe infections. For eons humans have lived with, and evolved to handle, over 200 different respiratory tract pathogens--all of which are far too tiny to be effectively blocked with cloth or surgical masks or even respirator masks under ordinary conditions.
See this detailed review: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2021-11/working-paper-64.pdf
As has been known for decades, the best systemic preventative against airborne respiratory pathogens is not masking but excellent ventilation, which the libraries’ spacious dimensions and new HVAC systems provide and which Plexiglas impedes. Now that almost everyone in the Boston area has some level of immunity to SarsCoV2, whether, natural and/or vaccine-induced (estimated 70-90%+), it is time to recognize masks and Plexiglas barriers for what they are--ineffective crutches that provide a false sense of security that mirrors the prevailing false sense of risk. I recognize that there may be frail and/or elderly library staff who have come to deeply fear going without a mask, but surely the library has a few healthy, brave and caring younger people willing on a daily basis to be the “public face” of the Public Library.
I beg of you to begin discouraging universal staff masking at the Brookline Public Libraries and implore at least some librarians to find the courage and compassion to welcome back library patrons, including the disabled, with smiles and friendly faces.
So glad I found you on twitter!!! Have been saying this for 2 years now-we NEVER gave residents a choice if they wanted to be treated like prisoners! Never asked them if they never wanted to see their families unmasked face again. Have a couple long term residents who willed themselves to die because they faced unending bouts of isolation, activities yanked away at moments notice because a 60 second vendor visit 3 days ago tested positive-putting home back into nasal rape outbreak status. No covid, happy go lucky in 2019-very social residents-dead now due to covid policies. 2 weeks mask free on vacation, cannot breathe in the N95 now.