Time to End the NHS Mask Mandate Postcode Lottery

For some time now, the Smile Free team have been highlighting the reality of face mask coercion varying from hospital to hospital, with whether you have to wear one or not depending entirely on the people setting the rules locally. COVID-19 infection rates are irrelevant: it all comes down to the views of individuals who have managed to get their hands on the levers of power. For those folk who are true believers in ‘The Science’, masks were – and are – a critically important weapon in the arsenal of non-pharmaceutical interventions. Blind to the realities of historical precedent, objective evidence and common sense, masks ‘work’, they claim, and we all have to get with the programme and strap them on.

Unlike the rest of the post-COVID-19 world where we are ‘learning to live’ with the respiratory infection, in some parts of the NHS masks are still required. Notwithstanding the directives issued from the very top of the Health Service to ‘step down’ COVID-19 measures, in some healthcare settings, often driven by the head of an individual trust’s infection prevention and control (IPC) function, what are still in effect mask mandates have not gone away. How individual trusts can maintain these controls is to be found buried in the small print of the reissued National Infection Prevention and Control manual (p.36) where a get-out clause comes down to those weasel words beloved by Health and Safety bureaucrats, ‘local risk assessment’. In short, if the head of IPC in Trust A wants to dispense with masks, he or she can; if the head of Trust B’s IPC wants to keep them, then they can be kept.

If this sounds a bit bonkers, well, that’s because it is. In a world where we’ve moved on from the constant news-bombing of stats for positive test ‘cases’, hospitalisations and deaths with COVID-19, we still can find ourselves being told that we are ‘expected’ to wear a mask. Why? Just because one person, with the lucky position from which to exercise their authority and masking peccadillos, says so.