In the United States, questioning or even just sullenly resenting public-health guidance is attributed to perverse irrationality or a kind of death wish among MAGA-hat-wearing radicals who deny science. But surely this can’t be said of German, Irish, British, and French public-health bodies.

With America diverging so dramatically from the World Health Organization and the European CDC, shouldn’t public-health officials have to explain and demonstrate that Americans are getting tremendous public-health benefits from these unusual interventions on young children, benefits which Europeans are inexplicably uninterested in?

If the scientific consensus is so obvious, why are American public-health officials not crying out to Europe about all the death and destruction they are needlessly undergoing because of their failure to gag two-year-olds?

Or maybe we can go with Occam’s razor and conclude that there is no easy consensus. And that maybe our mania for masking infants and young children, along with our unusual anxiety about vaccinating them for COVID, is self-referential, weird, and will only be a source of needless conflict.