Senate cancels future mask mandates
Sigh.
On Thursday the U.S. Senate approved an amendment to a Senate appropriations bill that prevents federal mask mandates on passenger airlines, commuter rail, rapid transit buses, and any other transportation program funded through the 2024 fiscal year. All Republican Senators voted for this as well as 10 Democrats.
That was JD Vance's anti-mask amendment that would block the DoT from using any federal money to: enforce mask mandates in response to COVID, prohibit any federal official from requiring masks on domestic air travel, and would prohibit air carriers, transit authorities and all educational institutions from refusing to serve people who don’t wear masks. https://www.cleveland.com/news/2023/10/jd-vances-anti-mask-amendment-passes-the-us-senate.html That is the same JD Vance who bought his seat via dark monied PACs and Peter Thiel's $10 million contribution. The same Peter Theil who high tailed it to New Zealand just when COVID entered the USA... https://www.huffpost.com/entry/peter-thiel-new-zealand-bunker-coronavirus_n_5e6f9ac9c5b6dda30fce44ba
Ryan McCormick, M.D. has an interesting website that the story above lead me to. I hope you find it and this article as interesting as I did. I especially felt as though he was speaking to me here:
Stuffing hundreds of people in a missile (with wings and a pressurized cabin) and then flying them at 40,000 feet can facilitate a great opportunity to see the world, and to breathe in other people’s breaths for hours at a time. Before I started wearing an N95 on planes I estimate that 75% of my vacations were partially ruined by getting sick. It’s hard to give you good scientific proof of cause and effect, but one study did show that if we are sitting within one row of someone who is sick with a respiratory illness, there is an 80% chance that we will contract their disease.
The anti mask crowd grasped onto studies that concluded that masks don’t work, but that has been easily debunked and is proven misinformation. Masks work in tandem with other efforts to diminish the risk of a high viral load that could lead to hospitalization and possibly death. (See the Swiss cheese meme below)
The Cochrane Library, a trusted source of health information, misled the public by prioritizing rigor over reality… The Cochrane finding was not that masking didn't work but that scientists lacked sufficient evidence of sufficient quality to conclude that they worked… Jefferson (study author) erased that distinction, in effect arguing that because the authors couldn't prove that masks did work, one could say that they didn't work. That's just wrong.
