At the beginning of a Medal of Honor ceremony last week, President Biden wore a mask. This provided an interesting juxtaposition: a public celebration of extreme courage, coupled with a pointless display of excessive risk-aversion. Biden also demonstrated his aversion to following scientific evidence, the best of which suggests that masks don’t work. In other words, the president was hiding his face from a Medal of Honor winner for nothing. (Biden did shed his mask later in the ceremony, as it was apparently only needed at the start.)

It’s not only in the White House that such mask hysteria reigns. Though masks impair communication and undermine learning, a junior high school in rural Alabama—where just 27 percent of students are proficient in math and 22 percent are proficient in reading—recently mandated masks. Meantime, an elementary school in Silver Spring, Maryland, also mandated masks, distributing KN95s (the Chinese version of N95s) to grade-schoolers. Most (59 percent) of the students in the Maryland school and almost all (96 percent) of those in the Alabama school are minorities. So much for “equity.”

Katherine J. Wu, a science writer for The Atlantic, recently reported that “across hospitals . . . infection-prevention experts shared one sentiment: They felt almost certain that the masks would need to return, likely by the end of the calendar year.” Wu asserts that “COVID’s arrival had cemented masks’ ability to stop respiratory spread” and says, “Nearly every expert I spoke with told me they expected that masks would at some point come back.”