Day 758: Public Malaise

Vinay Prasad lights into the corrupt institutions of public health and their role in abusing people, especially children, with masks, school closures, and other pandemic theater that left them less healthy than before—on the occasion of the NYC school system ending their WTF-inspiring outdoor mask mandate:

Let’s reflect on this for a moment. NYC school district has been requiring children wear masks OUTSIDE all this time. Years after we knew the virus almost never spreads outside. During recess when kids play, forced to wear a mask while exerting themselves. Wow!

Whoever made the policy is an idiot. No way around it. They are not fit for policymaking. They abused the power of government to coerce children (at incredibly low risk of bad outcomes) to wear a mask in a setting where the virus simply does not spread. In other words, they participated in something done in the name of public health, which actually made human beings worse off. Worse, they used coercive force to do it.

Post-COVID we need to seriously talk about setting restrictions. But not on people. We need to place restrictions on public health and things done in the name of public health. We cannot allow individuals who are poor at weighing risk and benefit and uncertainty to coerce human beings, disproportionately the young and powerless (waiters/ servers) to participate in interventions that have no data supporting them, for years on end.

Unfortunately for us, he can go on at some length about what idiot government functionaries and their ignorant fellow-travellers in the private sector have been up to without exhausting the subject.