Last week, U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle struck down the CDC’s transportation mask mandate using a bizarre misinterpretation of the 1944 Public Health Service Act. In what law professor Erin Fuse Brown called a “breathtaking amount of political judicial activism,” an un-elected conservative judge in Tampa single-handedly halted the CDC’s transportation mask mandate.  After news of the ruling broke, videos soon went viral showing flight attendants and pilots making gleeful mid-flight announcements pressuring travelers to remove their masks. People erupted into loud cheers and ripped masks off––as if the dynamics of viral transmission suddenly, magically differed as the result of Mizelle’s ruling. “Wearing a mask cleans nothing. At most, it traps virus droplets,” Mizelle wrote. "But it neither ‘sanitizes’ the person wearing the mask nor ‘sanitizes’ the conveyances.” Mizelle framed the issue as being about the freedom of travelers… Read More...

The pandemic is over. That much is clear in popular sentiment among liberal commentators and policymakers. In early February, Anthony Fauci told the Financial Times that the U.S. was exiting “the full blown pandemic phase” of covid. As Democratic party Governors dropped some of the last remaining state mask mandates in unison in recent weeks, Bloomberg ran an article titled “Mask Mandates Didn’t Make Much of a Difference Anyway.” In The Atlantic, Yascha Mounk asked, “How much longer will the restrictions on everyday life drag on? What purpose do they still serve?” Unfortunately, these shared sentiments are just that—sentiments, based in emotion or political calculation, bearing little relation to reality. More than 60,000 people died of covid in January alone; as of this writing, the U.S. has recorded more than 2,000 daily covid deaths for each of the last 30… Read More...