Masks fall out of favor as policy choice

In this third summer of the pandemic, public health policy has largely devolved to a matter of personal preference, with new mask mandates a rarity but the debate over masking hardly diminished from earlier stages of the pandemic.

Even though the coronavirus case count remains at high levels, Americans’ behavior no longer reflects that reality. The availability of vaccines and treatments appears to have attenuated pandemic anxiety, which has been replaced by fresh anxieties about war, crime and inflation.

“Just look around us,” Dr. Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University, told Yahoo News. “The majority have returned to their pre-pandemic lives. Public health policy has to adapt to where people are.”…

“Masks are now part of the culture wars, just as much as abortion and guns. But they shouldn’t be,” says Lawrence O. Gostin, a public health law scholar at Georgetown, one of several prominent experts submitting an amicus brief in favor of the CDC mandate.

“If the argument is that CDC has made errors during the pandemic, I accept that,” Gostin told Yahoo News in a telephone interview, arguing that those errors have been exploited by conservatives to undermine public health at a time when pandemic diseases are sure to appear again.