How to Explain Why Masking is a Bad Idea Right Now to Friends.

Don't Panic!

Let’s just elide over me making excuses for being absent. Expect the wave and never be disappointed. My life comes and goes in waves and I feel like the aftermath of covid response might be on the rise.

I am sure that you have seen a lot of posts on social media recently about why we MUST put masks back on “For the Children!” (Well really they kind of want the children to put their masks back on and stop intruding).

Two major narratives have surfaced in the last two weeks.

1. We need to bring masking back because things are getting really bad

2. Multiple covid infections are DESTROYING our immune systems!

This is all coming from a realization that the vaccines failed. They did not live up to their promise and now we need SOMETHING ELSE.

Let’s take the second point first: We need testable predictions from this idea that can prove it is covid and not our interventions that are causing issues. So far, I haven’t seen this, but I’m open to hearing from this. My gut says this doesn’t make sense, but I’m legitimately open to good evidence that removes other potential causative factors from the running. It’s interesting that this camp is seeing immune damage. I just suspect that our immune systems are up to the task of covid and the damage, if it is there, is coming from another source. But as far as I know we have no good tests to determine causation.

Okay let’s spend more time on the Maskers.

Maskers would have us believe - without evidence - that bringing back masks would solve the current, and very unfortunate, situation in our ERs and Pediatric wards in particular. A mask lover is unlikely to listen to the pre-pandemic papers and the only two cRCTs that actually tested masking during the pandemic (both showed no statistically significant benefit after analysis.) But perhaps they will consider an inspection of their premise?

During the pandemic, we tried a variety of things to trying a “flatten the curve” as it were. We social distanced - some more than others - we masked after a time (and I will freely admit I was a mask proponent for some time, if only given the behavior of our medical professionals, until I saw the actual data we have), we kept kids out of school, cancelled all activities, closed churches and gyms, skate parks (in some places), and then we vaccinated everyone with a pulse that we could get ahold of. Even threatening to withhold fun and money from those that did not consent to be vaccinated. Oh and in some places, we levied insane fines and witnessed horrific police brutality in the name of forced masking and isolation. Some countries even put people in quarantine camps.

I’m sure more examples can easily be named. The point is, none of them worked.

The more draconian isolationism of island nations like New Zealand, Australia, and even Japan (until the Olympics) did allow a modicum of control over the spread of covid, until the highly contagious Omicron just waltzed through their defenses. But with covid still spreading around the world, isolationism was just delaying the inevitable.

It’s possible that early lockdowns did slow infections for a time. Maybe.

The question we are starting to come to grips with now is “At what cost?”

And the answers are starting to trickle in and it is looking very much like we made a bad trade. And with the incredible wave of non-covid viruses that appear to be tearing through our children, we have to stop and wonder - what is going on?

Now the most benign answer must be that the viral interference that flattened RSV and Influenza around the world (in both masked and unmasked countries) simply removed them from the immune landscape for nearly two years. An adult has almost certainly encountered both of these illnesses before in their lives and regardless of any mutations from their prior form, are not starting immunologically flat footed. The body already partially recognizes the antigen and can quickly adapt to the newer form.

But many have never encountered these pathogens before, especially those born in the pandemic. The could be similar to the natives of North and South America when the Europeans arrived. Their immune systems have not see anything like these illnesses and take too long to respond effectively.

If that is the cause, then there wasn’t much we could do during the pandemic to avoid this.

But what if it’s not - or if it’s only part. What if droplets are vital to immune priming? What if the one thing that masks were blocking is actually the “sampling” method of the immune system. Exposing the immune system to small doses of a pathogen at it’s borders. The mucus membranes. This is all theoretical, (as is the prior speculation) but what if we regularly get sub-infectious inoculums of pathogens throughout our lives in droplets. Short lived in the air, less likely to evade the perimeter immune response and go straight for the lungs, droplets of the swarm of pathogens around in society interact with our immune systems constantly and allow our bodies to sample what is “out there” and start to prepare antibodies (not mature, well matched antibodies, but general and loosely optimized) which gives our body a jump start on identifying and attacking a pathogen we encounter.

Or what if it’s the shots we gave to as many kids as we could reach? (And last summer’s out of season RSV wave wasn’t so bad because we hadn’t vaccinated anyone under 12)

Or the microplastics and other materials they breathed in through their required masks?

We simply don’t know.

There are studies we could run, correlations we could look for between kids who masked the longest and those who masked the least. Counties with the longest and strictest lockdowns, counties with the highest pediatric vaccination rate. The list of tests is long, but we need to run them.

Why? And this is the conclusion that I want you to remember when your friend yells at you for resisting new mask mandates.

Something or some things that we did, or that happened to us, during the pandemic have lead to this outcome. If we don’t know what caused this outcome, how can we know that what we are doing to try and solve the current crisis is going to make things better? How do we ensure that we are not making things worse or simply kicking the can down the road.

One thing I think we all learned during the pandemic is that when emotions are high, decisions are questionable. Let’s avoid making emotional decisions just to do something. Instead, let’s take the time to do what we should have done from the start. Run the tests, find out if what we think we know is actually true. If we don’t, we risk making things much, much worse.