Last week, the Bundestag finally passed the Infection Protection Act drawn up by Karl Lauterbach and Marco Buschmann. By the time these latest regulations expire, it will have been around 1,100 days to flatten the curve, and there’s no promise that we’ll be done even then. The law primarily empowers the federal states to impose mask mandates during the winter-tyre season, between October 1st and Easter. At the end there were some final, insulting adjustments: The federal government withdrew the general mask mandates for airplanes, in exchange for German-wide FFP2 masking requirements at healthcare clinics.
We have been doing this for a very long time now. That is pretty much the only observation I have left in me. We have had two-and-a-half years of recurring all-day masking regimens for schoolchildren. We have had two-and-a-half years of masking in the hallways of our offices, but generally not at our desks. We have had two years of masking on the way to the toilet at the pub, but not at our tables. We have had two years of non-sealing FFP2 respirators instead of surgical masks, although we’ve known since the beginning that SARS-2 is transmitted primarily via aerosols. We have had two-and-a-half years of masks failing every natural experiment that they’ve been put to, two-and-a-half years of masks serving as a pretence to ban protests, two-and-a-half years of social anxiety and unnecessary arguments with confrontational terrified old people, two-and-a-half years of mandated social isolation and anonymity, and it has all been for nothing.
This Science Following upon which we’ve embarked, has been a curious experiment indeed. It amounts to an abdication of our own sense and reason, in favour of some nebulous superordinate authority that is the only true source of knowledge about the world. For millions and millions of people, masks simply work even when they don’t, because The Science says so, and the mandates are necessary to prevent infections, even when they cannot, because The Science says so.
