The Misery of the Maskaholics

As the New York Times’s Sarah Maslin Nir writes, “Even as a combination of evolving public health recommendations and pandemic fatigue lead more Americans to toss the masks they have worn for more than a year, [Joe] is among those who say they plan to keep their faces covered in public indefinitely.”

Indefinitely? What gives?

We’re not mocking this man; we just want to understand. As Nir continues, “For people like [Joe], a combination of anxiety, murky information about new virus variants and the emergence of an obdurate and sizable faction of vaccine holdouts means mask-free life is on hold — possibly forever.” (Leave it to the Times to choose “obdurate” when “stubborn” would’ve worked perfectly well.)

There’s clearly a political component to all this. Progressives have been more willing to abide by their government’s masking and lockdown orders, while conservatives have been less so. Think: blue state versus red state, tyranny versus Liberty. In fact, when we overlay two U.S. maps, one showing the level of mask compliance and the other showing 2020 voting preference, we see remarkable similarity. Joe Biden is Mr. Mask, after all, and Nancy Pelosi has, to use Timesspeak, obdurately refused to lift her masking rule on the House floor, despite the CDC’s clear guidance to the contrary.