Recently, Rhode Island Twitter has become a display of people who seem deranged with fear about the end of mask mandates.  It’s a curious puzzle.

Some of the known progressives are probably responding to the movement’s understanding that keeping people depressed and isolated is in their ideological and political interests, and that surely filters out into the general public, like contagious radiation.  Naturally, however, the progressives in the public health bureaucracy are happy to lend some propaganda to the push.

Doug Badger gives a careful look to the study behind a widely shared chart from the CDC making masking look extremely effective:

The made-for-Twitter visual mischaracterizes the findings of the Feb. 4 study. That study was so poorly designed that the confidence intervals—the range of possible results, similar to the “+/-” in public opinion polls—were large enough to render its findings meaningless.

Of course, the anti-mandate side has folks who are willing to overstate their own case, and it can be difficult to know what the truth is.  Taking it all in, I continue to think the reality is that masks can be effective for some people in some circumstances but cause more harm than good as a blanket mandate, especially in schools.  The fact that schools look likely to be the last place unmasked shows that we’re not dealing with science, but with a mix of politics and fear.