Three years into the pandemic, the question of whether to mask or not to mask shows no signs of heading toward a resolution, especially during a winter season that has seen a so-called
"COVID is the thing that concerns us most as we look to the days and weeks ahead," Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House pandemic response team coordinator,For public health officials concerned with a new winter spike, masking is an obvious solution to a recurrent problem.
. But officials like Jha who work on the pandemic have ceased to emphasize masking as a matter of course, the way they did in 2020 and early 2021. Incentives for vaccination disappeared long ago, and many Americans who received their initial inoculations decided against booster shots that were updated to fight new variances of the coronavirus.“People don’t want to be dealing with this pandemic forever,” Thill acknowledged in a telephone interview.
Even Jha, the White House coordinator, has become something of a mask skeptic."There is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well," he said in December, in aWashington physician McBride is one of the founders of Urgency of Normal, a group started last year to advocate for doing away with pandemic restrictions. Last week,across the country.