This week, statewide mask mandates terminated in two states — Iowa and Montana.
While state governments were giving the OK for ditching masks, President Joe Biden was telling reporters Thursday at the National Institutes of Health that people should keep wearing masks until at least next year, claiming that doing so “can save lives, a significant number of lives.”
This declaration came in muffled words and heavy breathing through at least two masks while Biden, standing behind a podium, acknowledged he was more than ten feet from anyone.
Biden made this claim of masks’ life-saving ability despite the facts that regular mask wearing does have negative health consequences and that it has not been established that mask wearing provides any net protection against coronavirus infection.
Biden is not just recommending that people wear masks. The Biden administration has already rolled out in its first three weeks sweeping countrywide mask mandates. Mask wearing is now mandated across the country — via executive branch fiat — for people in many circumstances related to public transportation and even when just in a taxi or ride share vehicle and for people who are in a US government building or on US government land.
And the plan is for these US government mask mandates to be enforced harshly. As James Bovard wrote in a recent article, for example, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) policy calls for monitoring both if people are wearing masks and if people are wearing the right kinds of masks in the right way, with fines of up to 1,500 dollars imposed on individuals who TSA determines have not adequately complied.
It looks like Americans are set to suffer tag team mask tyranny. As state governments remove authoritarian mask mandates, the US government is stepping in to ensure freedom remains suppressed.
