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Some Covid Links

Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown reports on inexcusable Covidocratic mistreatment of young children.

Reason‘s Robby Soave is rightly critical of yesterday’s decision to extend, at least until April 18th, the air-travel mask mandate in the U.S. A slice:

Contrary to what the TSA and the CDC think, it would be perfectly reasonable for passengers and commuters to de-mask right now. At this point, mask mandates are arbitrary. There is no scientific rationale for forcibly masking young school children but not restaurant diners, or subway riders but not library visitors, or airline passengers but not members of Congress: Our elderly president, senators, and senior administration officials were nearly entirely unmasked for the State of the Union. Government planners are making up policies that have no basis in health.

In December, the heads of various airlines testified before Congress that the air filtration systems on planes are better than the air filtration systems in hospital intensive care units. “I think the case is very strong that masks don’t add much, if anything, in the air cabin environment,” said Gary Kelly, CEO of Southwest Airlines. “It is very safe and very high quality compared to any other indoor setting.”

A few days later, White House coronavirus advisor Anthony Fauci said that he thought people should wear masks on airplanes for… forever, essentially. “I think when you’re dealing with a closed space, even though the filtration is good, that you want to go that extra step when you have people—you know, you get a flight from Washington to San Francisco, it’s well over a five-hour flight,” he said. “Even though you have a good filtration system, I still believe that masks are a prudent thing to do, and we should be doing it.”

Passengers who want the extra protection afforded by masks are welcome to keep wearing them.

Good news out of Austria: “Austria suspends Europe’s strictest COVID-19 vaccine mandate.” (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Jenin Younes tweets:

Every day more data pours in that COVID policies embraced by the federal & many state governments were ineffective and harmful. Instead of recognizing error, they are doubling down on censorship of those with dissenting views on the topic. This should terrify any thinking person