What's Up With The New Yorker's Weird "Masks Forever" Article?
More than 500k US deaths after her last piece chiding people for still caring about COVID-19 in May 2021, Emma Green shared another head-scratcher.
Hello, dear readers! Happy New Year to you all. Let’s talk a little bit about COVID-19 today.
Back in Spring 2021, it looked like COVID was beginning to loosen its grip on the world. Reported case numbers were plummeting, the number of daily deaths and hospitalizations was similarly trending downward, and the vaccines were in the world and doing their thing. Sure, there were breakthrough cases, but they seemed to be pretty rare.
Around the same time, a handful of mainstream news outlets began churning out article after article mocking people who hadn’t yet ditched the steps they’d taken in their personal lives to stay safe from the virus that had killed more than 575,000 Americans. One such piece was The Atlantic’s “The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown.”
The piece was by Emma Green, a right-leaning writer whose beat at the magazine was “politics, policy, and religion” until she left for The New Yorker in November 2021. What struck me about “The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown” were the absurd leaps in logic Green took for the sake of trying to create a narrative that people (“liberals”) who were still concerned about COVID-19 in April and May 2021 were somehow as bad as the people (Republicans) who a year earlier were denying the virus’ existence or singing the praises of phony miracle cures.
And yes, if this all sounds familiar, I wrote about this very essay in July 2021:
Exactly one week later, The Atlantic’s Emma Green published “The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown.” Green’s piece was a classic bit of “both sides” journalism — a hot take dressed up as a reported feature. Many conservatives refused to take any COVID-19 precautions and have (to this day) resisted getting vaccinated. To “balance” this, there had to be an equal but opposite narrative to apply to people on the left. That’s where Green’s piece came in:
“Lurking among the jubilant Americans venturing back out to bars and planning their summer-wedding travel is a different group: liberals who aren’t quite ready to let go of pandemic restrictions. For this subset, diligence against COVID-19 remains an expression of political identity—even when that means overestimating the disease’s risks or setting limits far more strict than what public-health guidelines permit,” wrote Green. Later in the piece, she hit on the underlying theme of the article, writing, “Some conservatives refused to wear masks or stay home, because of skepticism about the severity of the disease or a refusal to give up their freedoms. But this is a different story, about progressives who stressed the scientific evidence, and then veered away from it.”
The takeaway from Green’s piece was this: Democrats who continued to take precautions against COVID-19 in their personal lives were just as bad as the Republicans who have refused to take precautions all along.
I wrote that just two months after Green’s article, but her take had already aged like 12 gallons of milk. At that point, infections, hospitalizations, and deaths from the pandemic virus were once again on the rise.
Fast-forward to last week, nearly 20 months and 525,000 additional COVID-linked deaths in the US later: Green put out a new article with a familiar theme.
On December 28, 2022, The New Yorker published Green’s “The Case For Wearing Masks Forever.” The piece was not actually Green making a “case for wearing masks forever” — though that would have actually made for a really interesting article born out of a reflection on her past writing. Rather, “The Case For Wearing Masks Forever” is the closest thing to a direct sequel to “The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown” the world will ever see.
The piece is about a group called the People’s CDC, which is described as “a ragtag coalition of academics, doctors, activists, and artists who believe that the government has left them to fend for themselves against COVID-19.” In and of itself, this sounds like a really interesting premise for an article. Unfortunately, with Green as its author, the piece was doomed to become a “wokeness gone mad” piece, as Michael Hobbes referred to it on Twitter.
As Hobbes pointed out in his Twitter thread, Green’s story “casts left-wing activists as hysterical while also acknowledging that they’re correct on the merits.” For instance, in this paragraph, Green portrays the People’s CDC as pushing conspiracy theories (“Although the People’s CDC tends to see large corrupting forces at work behind shifts in public-health policy, sometimes the actual explanations are more mundane”), ignoring that the People’s CDC’s claims are either defensible on the merits or are being wildly misrepresented for the sake of continuing Green’s “Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown” narrative of the COVID-cautious as being detached from reality.
The scientific claims that the People’s C.D.C. makes about the real C.D.C.’s policies are not necessarily straightforward, either. The People’s C.D.C. says that a five-day isolation period for vaccinated people is unsupported by evidence, but some studies suggest that most transmission happens right before and right after people develop symptoms, and that vaccinated people spread the virus for a shorter period of time than unvaccinated people. The group argues that one-way masking is insufficient, but some experts in airborne transmission argue that it’s strongly protective for vulnerable people. Although the People’s C.D.C. tends to see large, corrupting forces at work behind shifts in public-health policy, sometimes the actual explanations are more mundane. Anne Zink, Alaska’s chief medical officer and the president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, pushed back on Wallace’s claim that states are in cahoots with the C.D.C. to abandon basic COVID data-gathering. Her department doesn’t have the money or political backing to set up daily nasal-swab testing sites. Instead, it’s investing in wastewater testing, but not as a conspiracy to obscure what’s happening—the practice is just more sustainable.
Let’s break down the claims made in that paragraph.
“The People’s C.D.C. says that a five-day isolation period for vaccinated people is unsupported by evidence, but some studies suggest that most transmission happens right before and right after people develop symptoms, and that vaccinated people spread the virus for a shorter period of time than unvaccinated people.” When President Joe Biden tested positive for COVID-19 on July 21, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the president would be following “White House protocol for positive COVID cases, which goes above and beyond CDC guidance.” Instead of five days, the White House would wait until Biden tested negative to exit isolation, however long that would take. Biden exited isolation six days later on July 27, but tested positive again on July 30. It wasn’t until August 7 that Biden again left isolation. Similarly, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky tested positive for COVID-19 on October 22. Nine days later, still working remotely, Walensky tested positive once again and remained isolated until a November 8 negative test. When you consider the fact that not even the head of the CDC or the President of the US followed the CDC’s guidelines (which don’t require a negative test to resume in-person activities), and you look at some of the other groups that have criticized the CDC’s isolation guidelines (for instance, in January 2022, the president of the American Medical Association called the five-day guidance “confusing” and “counterproductive”), it gets harder to see the People’s CDC’s position on the five-day isolation period as conspiracy-minded. Additionally, Green’s addition of “…some studies suggest…” doesn’t actually address the People’s CDC’s criticism on this topic.
The group argues that one-way masking is insufficient, but some experts in airborne transmission argue that it’s strongly protective for vulnerable people. Again, Green’s attempt at pushing back on the belief that “one-way masking is insufficient” doesn’t actually address the point being made. “…but some experts in airborne transmission argue that it’s strongly protective for vulnerable people” doesn’t answer the question of whether or not one-way masking is sufficient or not, and is instead just a basic restatement of the obvious, that one-way masking provides better protection than no masking at all. Without Green digging deeper into what “sufficient” means in such a context, her attempt to portray the group as extreme or paranoid just doesn’t land with a factual punch.
Although the People’s C.D.C. tends to see large, corrupting forces at work behind shifts in public-health policy, sometimes the actual explanations are more mundane. This was the sentence in that paragraph that irritated me the most. The clear implication here is that the People’s CDC is a group made up of conspiracy theorists who reject reasonable explanations. And while that may (or may not, I’m not writing this as a way to dive into the People’s CDC’s statements or beliefs; that was supposed to be Green’s job) be true, Green’s example of states saying they don’t “have the money or political backing to set up daily nasal-swab testing sites” isn’t a real rebuttal to the claim that state governments are scaling back on testing and data collection. The entire premise of the People’s CDC’s argument is that political leaders aren’t investing enough in testing, prevention, and data collection.
Throughout the piece, Green sneers at the group she’s profiling. For example, just look at this paragraph, where she refers to one People’s CDC member as “the group’s saltiest spokesman” and then grills him about whether the group is filled with communists:
The group’s saltiest spokesman is Rob Wallace, an independent scientist and researcher who anchors another weekly rundown called COVID This Week. In ten-to-twenty-minute-long video briefings, Wallace runs through slides mapping the rise of new variants and levels of covid detected in wastewater—an indicator of spread that, he claimed in a November dispatch, will become increasingly important as states follow “the N.I.H. and C.D.C.’s lead [by] abandoning covid-surveillance reporting.” Wallace saves the most colorful part of his reports until the end, when he comments on the political and corporate influences shaping public-health policy. In August, when the C.D.C. announced an internal reorganization to address its pandemic failures, Wallace observed that “the whole affair has an air of rearranging the chairs on the deck of a sinking ship.” He added, “The U.S. is on the far side of its cycle of accumulation and its high point in building empire. Its political class is now in the business of helping its financial supporters cash out, turning capital into money.” All the talk about empire-building and capital accumulation—a key component of Marxist economic theory—made me wonder whether “the people” in the People’s C.D.C. are those people. When I asked Wallace this on Zoom, he gruffly denied that the members are all communists. “There’s certainly an edge of Red-baiting on your part,” he said.
Whatever your thoughts on the People’s CDC (I’ll be honest, I hadn’t heard of this group before this article and I’m not particularly interested in it, specifically), this article, like “The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown" before it, is a mess.
I found Green’s accompanying Twitter thread helpful for understanding what she found outlandish about the People’s CDC’s whole ordeal.
She wrote:
A while ago, someone I know started sending around links to the People's CDC—a coalition that styles itself as a model of what the CDC would look like if it actually **followed the science** on pandemic restrictions. I was fascinated.
They believe America has left its most vulnerable citizens behind. They believe people should be avoiding indoor dining, moving gatherings outside, testing before events, etc. They believe we should wear masks, basically forever.
As I looked into the group more, I came to see them as representative of something much bigger: a public-health left that feels abandoned by the Biden administration and mainstream institutions, but has a large microphone, esp. on social media.
The public-health left does not hesitate to use strong language: not masking is a form of white supremacy. The Biden administration has made its decisions at the command of big business. Perhaps most shocking: The CDC is eugenicist.
What fascinates me is how these groups use science to make moral arguments. In their view, science proves their worldview. This is a form of scientism—a belief that scientific evidence can definitively resolve conflicts over values.
“The public-health left does not hesitate to use strong language: not masking is a form of white supremacy. The Biden administration has made its decisions at the command of big business. Perhaps most shocking: The CDC is eugenicist” was the tweet that really caught my attention.
“Shocking!” Well, let’s check in on the “strong language” front. Back in February 2021, just a month after Donald Trump’s failed self-coup, Green did a friendly interview with right-wing radio host Eric Metaxas, who said he believed that the US was becoming more like Nazi Germany. Metaxas, who in December 2020 said, “We need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood” to illegitimately install Trump for a second term in office and called on Trump to appoint right-wing nutcases Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell to top government positions to help ensure the self-coup would be successful, was lobbed a few softballs by Green, who clearly sympathized with his position.
But yeah, sure, it’s “shocking” that people might think that maybe arguments that “Biden administration has made its decisions at the command of big business” when it comes to pandemic response are worth considering. As Green wrote (emphasis mine):
Among the people I spoke with who have actually led public-health agencies, all were sympathetic to some of the critiques that the People’s C.D.C. makes. “The pandemic has opened what were cracks in our health-care system and exposed them as large chasms,” Zink said. “The systems that we have built have failed America and failed us individually.” But these experts also found it hard to take the group seriously because of its strident analysis. “To make claims that C.D.C. is beholden to big business—this is just nonsense, frankly,” Frieden, the agency’s former leader, said. “Once you’re sitting at C.D.C., your goal is not to say the thing that makes you feel best or sounds most politically correct or radical.”
Yeah, totally difficult to think that the government factors in the wants and needs of big business when it comes to setting health policy. Sure! Related:
On December 21, 2021, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian (along with the company’s chief health officer and a medical advisor), sent a letter to Walensky urging the CDC to reduce the 10-day isolation recommendation in favor of a five-day plan for “vaccinated individuals who experience breakthrough COVID-19 infections.” Two days later, Airlines for America, a lobbyist group representing a number of large airlines including Southwest, American, United, and Delta, echoed the call.
And wow, what a weird coincidence! Just six days after Delta asked the CDC to change its recommended isolation time from 10 days to five, and just four days after the airline lobby threw its weight behind Delta’s call, the CDC just so happened to announce that exact change to its policy! Wow! Totally a coincidence, I’m sure!
Of course, the government takes lobbyists' wishes into account when making policy. Let’s not pretend that any government or any political party is free from the influence of lobbyists. If that were the case, if lobbying didn’t make a difference, lobbying wouldn’t exist. But it does. Because it works. When the very boring and basic claim that the government may be considering business/macroeconomic factors in public health decisions is treated as a scandalous conspiracy theory, it’s… well, it tells you a lot about the world that the author is trying to sell people on.
I think I’ll pick this topic back up later in the week for a more general “let’s take a look at how this factors into the broader media landscape” kind of view, as I’m sure that most people have checked out by now (sorry! it went long!), but the way that COVID-19 is being covered in major news outlets — and especially how it’s being covered by writers at outlets that are pretty clearly bored with the very idea of COVID — has me raising an eyebrow.
That’s it for today. Thanks to everyone out there for reading. I hope you all had a happy and restful Christmas/New Year/wintertime holiday of choice.
Until next time,
Parker
(sitting at home, in quarantine with my wife and 2yo daughter, my wife and I are both COVID positive, both wearing masks indoors to try and keep our daughter from testing positive, hence no work is getting done and no daycare is happening)
yeah those libs just can’t quit **deep wracking cough** lockdown
When someone first told me about this (I no longer have a New Yorker subscription) my first thought was, "Hey, sounds like that terrible 'Liberals can't quit lockdown' thing in the Atlantic that I read last year!" (and in case you're wondering, I no longer have a subscription to the Atlantic either). So imagine my surprise to find it's the same writer, and that her reaction to being almost immediately proven wrong with her 2021 Hot Take is to write almost the same thing AGAIN, just for a different liberal-prestige magazine. Truly, there is ZERO accountability among our elite classes, and just saying that will get me labeled a Marxist by the likes of Emma Green, I'm sure.