Tag: mask mandates
When Experts Fail – The Atlantic
Experts hate to be wrong. When I first started writing about the public’s hostility toward expertise and established knowledge more than a decade ago, I predicted that any number of crises—including a pandemic—might be the moment that snaps the public back to its senses. I was wrong. I didn’t foresee how some citizens and their leaders would respond to the cycle of advances and setbacks in the scientific process and to the inevitable limitations of human experts.
The coronavirus
Why the lab-leak and mask debates are such a disaster
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In the past few weeks, the conventional wisdom about COVID seems to have been upended.
Early in the pandemic, several mainstream news outlets dismissed theories that COVID came from a Chinese lab. But recently The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported that the Department of
America Is in the ‘Figure It Out Yourself’ Era of the Pandemic
In 2018, while reporting on pandemic preparedness in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I heard many people joking about the fictional 15th article of the country’s constitution: Débrouillez-vous, or “Figure it out yourself.” It was a droll and weary acknowledgment that the government won’t save you, and you must make do with the resources you’ve got. The United States is now firmly in the débrouillez-vous era of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Across the country, almost all government efforts to curtail
The Pandemic Isn’t Over for Immunocompromised People
When the coronavirus pandemic began, Emily Landon thought about her own risk only in rare quiet moments. An infectious-disease doctor at the University of Chicago Medicine, she was cramming months of work into days, preparing her institution for the virus’s arrival in the United States. But Landon had also recently developed rheumatoid arthritis—a disease in which a person’s immune system attacks their own joints—and was taking two drugs that, by suppressing said immune system, made her more vulnerable to pathogens.
The Case Against Masks at School
In the panicked spring of 2020, as health officials scrambled to keep communities safe, they recommended various restrictions and interventions, sometimes in the absence of rigorous science supporting them. That was understandable at the time. Now, however, two years into this pandemic, keeping unproven measures in place is no longer justifiable. Although no district is likely to roll back COVID policies in the middle of the Omicron surge, at the top of the list of policies we should rethink once
Your Starkly Different Perspectives on Omicron
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As the Omicron stage of the pandemic wears on, many of you are anxious, frustrated, and incredulous or even despairing as to how others are behaving––but you’re not of like mind. Some of you believe that the response to the new variant is overwrought, while others think that it is underwhelming.
“How should America’s colleges, high schools, and elementary schools handle the winter surge of COVID-19 cases associated with the Omicron variant?” I asked
The CDC’s Flawed Case for Wearing Masks in School
The debate over child masking in schools boiled over again this fall, even above its ongoing high simmer. The approval in late October of COVID-19 vaccines for 5-to-11-year-olds was for many public-health experts an indication that mask mandates could finally be lifted. Yet with cases on the rise in much of the country, along with anxiety regarding the Omicron variant, other experts and some politicians have warned that plans to pull back on the policy should be put on hold.
Vaccine Mandates: How Republicans and Democrats Feel
The vaccinated, across party lines, have kind of had it with the unvaccinated, an array of new polls suggests.
While most state and national GOP leaders are focused on defending the rights of unvaccinated Americans, new polling shows that the large majority of vaccinated adults—including a substantial portion of Republicans—support tougher measures against those who have refused COVID-19 shots.
These new results, shared exclusively with The Atlantic by several pollsters, reveal that significant majorities of people who have been vaccinated
Can Joe Biden Work With Republicans?
With rare exceptions, Joe Biden throughout his presidency has stressed his determination to cooperate with the GOP whenever possible and has minimized his personal confrontations with Republican leaders on both the national and state levels. That strategy has yielded the tangible benefit of the big bipartisan infrastructure bill now marching toward Senate approval, likely in the next few days. It has also allowed him to build strong working relationships with several Republican governors over combating the coronavirus pandemic and