Tweet [1]
… is from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial-features editor James Taranto’s essay “Covid Mask Mandates, Authority and Status [2],” which appears in today’s print edition:
About a year ago, mask mandates became a matter less of promoting public health than of imposing authority on people with lower status. That explains why they have lingered far longer in schools and colleges, which have the ability to control the behavior of students, than in most adult settings, even though young people are at low risk from Covid. It explains why political officeholders so often flouted their own mask mandates in public. It explains why, during the brief Covid spring of 2021, the CDC decreed that only unvaccinated people needed to keep wearing masks.