According to Walensky, N95s “are very hard to breathe in” and “are very hard to tolerate” so she worries that “if we suggest or require that people wear an N95, they won’t wear them all the time.”

Yet I’ve worn N95s many times, and there are many comfortable ones — some better than cloth masks because the seal is so good that my glasses don’t fog up. And if it were a problem, why hasn’t the C.D.C. made sure there were more comfortable ones available?

Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious disease specialist who’s pushed for more protective masks for the public from the beginning, recently pointed out that as far back as 2008, N95s have been approved for public use during a public health emergency. What happened to that now that we have an actual pandemic?

Even my own doctor complained that he wasn’t sure which ones being sold were counterfeit — baffling that this is still a problem, even two years in.