On the other hand, I think COVID hawks can understate the costs of pandemic restrictions. Many progressives have expressed incredulity about complaints from the pro-normalization contingent, insisting that everything is already back to normal. But Social Security offices around the country remain closed, making it more difficult for their vulnerable constituents to secure benefits. Children who merely have close contact with a person infected with COVID can be expelled from a week of school or child care in some jurisdictions, disrupting their educations and their parents’ work schedules. And there is some evidence that constant masking in schools may impair child development by inhibiting the acquisition of face-reading skills.

Some pro-mandate rhetoric also strikes me as overheated. The Atlantic’s Ed Yong recently defended the notion that America’s lackluster efforts to protect the immunocompromised can be understood as a form of eugenics, writing, “When a society acts as if the deaths of vulnerable people are unavoidable, and does little to lessen their risks, it is still implicitly assigning lower value to certain lives.” I think American society is shamefully callous in its treatment of all manner of vulnerable groups including those most at-risk from COVID. But proponents of eugenics sought to improve society by encouraging the “fit” to reproduce while removing the “unfit” from the future gene pool. What made eugenic policies distinctive was not that they reflected an indifference to the fate of the vulnerable (something that could be said of a high percentage of all laws in the early 20th century) but that their primary purpose was to remove the genetically disabled and/or “racially inferior” from the human community. It is silly to suggest that parents who want schools to lift mask mandates are motivated primarily by a desire to cleave the unfit from America’s gene pool.