“Neanderthal” states are getting rid of masks and lockdowns because real life science says they’re useless at best, and are often counterproductive. So who’s ignoring science? From the Issues and Insights Editorial board at issuesinsights.com:
President Joe Biden wasn’t too happy when Texas and Mississippi decided to reopen their economies and liberate their people from statewide mask mandates, calling it “Neanderthal thinking.”
But wait a minute, who’s following the science here, and who isn’t? While Biden is clearly in love with the idea of the government forcing Americans to wear masks and keeping heavy restrictions on businesses, the science is piling up showing that these measures are not very effective, if they are at all.
One Swiss group, for example, found 10 studies challenging the effectiveness of masks. One is a Danish review that compared a control group that followed social distancing guidelines but didn’t wear masks, while another group wore high-quality surgical masks. It found no statistically significant difference between the two groups.
An article in the New England Journal of Medicine, meanwhile, noted that “Focusing on universal masking alone may, paradoxically, lead to more transmission of COVID-19 if it diverts attention from implementing more fundamental infection-control measures.”
The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine noted last July that “despite two decades of pandemic preparedness, there is considerable uncertainty as to the value of wearing masks.”
Then there’s the fact, as we noted in this space back in November, that states experiencing the biggest spikes in COVID cases last fall already had statewide mask mandates in place. The Heritage Foundation drilled down the county level and found that “97 of the 100 counties with the most confirmed cases had either a county-level mask mandate, a state-level mandate, or both.”
