Un-unmasking
In recent weeks, the CDC has revised its guidance for wearing masks outdoors, indicating that for the vaccinated outdoor masking is likely unnecessary. Which is a great thing; it’s one less thing to be anxious about, and it hopefully reflects a better sense of how this virus works and how best to protect ourselves from it.
But in an extremely short amount of time the guidance of “it’s okay to wear a mask outside” had been transformed into a moral judgment on those who persisted in masking up outdoors. A lot of pundits, all of them white, most of them centrists, technocrats, and wonks whose job is to opine about things they know nothing about, have taken to Twitter to decry the new “irrationality” of people who still wear masks outside.
Unsurprisingly, among the voices leading this charge is overpaid astrologer Nate Silver, who gets paid to predict things that often don’t happen. “It’s very difficult to know what constitutes rational behavior during a pandemic like COVID-19 so there’s a limit to how much you might judge anybody’s choices,” he wrote on May 4. “But I’d argue one sign of *irrationality* is if a person doesn’t change their behavior much after being vaccinated.” Nor he is alone; a number of writers have taken to twitter or Substack to talk about this new pandemic of “irrational” behavior, by which they mean, people who choose to keep their masks on.
