I was at Wegman’s the other night, shopping without a mask for the first time in more than a year. It was a strange experience, walking he aisles and passing others who were masked. Wegman’s policy is that vaccinated patrons can go maskless, and we received our shots in March and April and so are among the nearly 50 percent of the population that are fully vaccinated.
Still, it felt wrong to be shopping maskless when so many other shoppers were wearing masks. As if the shoppers and employees were staring at us, thinking us to be among the great unmasked that have helped prolong the pandemic.
Similar policies are in place at other stores — Aldi and Big Lots, for instance, posted similar signs, and we are witnessing increased capacity at sporting events and restaurants. There is a kind of ambivalence out there, one earned by the uncertainty created by a virus that led to shifting recommendations on masking, a virus that has evolved into more transmissible variants, and a splintered political environment in which masks suddenly were cast as a violation of one’s liberty.
Just this week, a hat shop in the Nashville area was sell “‘Not Vaccinated’ stick-on patches modeled after the yellow stars Jews were forced to wear in Nazi-occupied Europe,” according to The New York Post. And Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Qanon-believing Congresswoman from Georgia, compared mask and vaccine mandates to the Nuremberg Laws in Holocaust-era Germany.
The freedom argument is hyperbolic, lacking any real legitimacy once you dig into it. It relies on overly broad definitions of freedom that rob us of any sense of conscience or conscientiousness. To be free, according to the anti-maskers, is to have no responsibility to others, to privilege selfishness and communal disregard, to act with impunity. Erich Fromm, the psychologist and philosopher, posited that freedom requires something greater than just saying “no”; it involves thinking through why one is saying “no,” what saying no means for the individual, for the collective and whether, by saying “no,” “he acts out of anger, disappointment, resentment, yet not in the name of a conviction or a principle” (Fromm ebook).
This disregard has come about amid a pandemic that in about 15 months has resulted in nearly 600,000 lives lost in the United States alone and more than 33.2 million people infected. And it dogs the current moment. Even as states relax social-distancing and mask rules amid rising vaccination rates and falling infection, death, and hospitalization rates, s vaccination rates rise and most negative metrics have been on a downward trajectory — “the virus outlook in this country is the best it has been at any point in the pandemic,” writes The New York Times.
And yet, we are far from free of the virus. India remains mired in a “surge” of infections, and the developing world lags in vaccinations. As CNN reports, nations like Brazil — where just 10 percent of the population is fully vaccinate — are seeing drastic increases in new infections. “On Wednesday (June 2), the country recorded more than 95,000 new Covid-19 infections, the second-highest figure since the pandemic began,” CNN said of Brazil. CNN reports that COVID deaths in the African region are up and there has been a dramatic uptick in infections in Vietnam, possibly due to a new variant which Vietnamese health officials say “appears to be a hybrid of two highly transmissible strains.” (The World Health Organization disputes this.)
This should raise concern, even as Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, argues that “the prognosis is good” in the United States, provided “the patient continues to do what the patient is doing, and that is continuing as a country, if you want to make that metaphor go, continue to get vaccinated.”
Vaccines are not perfect, as Dr. Arif R. Sarwari, associate professor of infectious diseases and Chair of the Department of Medicine at West Virginia University, writes in The Conversation. Nothing is. But the “high efficacy of these vaccines in the closely controlled environment of clinical trials matches their effectiveness in real life,” he wrote. The data so far, he said, shows that the vaccinated are 70% to 85% “protected from getting infected.” However, he adds, “It’s impossible to know whether a person (will be) fully protected or could still develop a mild case if exposed to the coronavirus,” or how infectious one might be in that case.
Still, vaccination remains our best defense at this point, not just here but around the globe. Vaccination limits spread, which is the most important thing we can do, given how viruses mutate and change. According to the CDC, viruses are not static. New variants occur regularly. This is especially true when a virus spreads among populations lacking antibodies developed by vaccination or through infection and recovery. Dr. Priya Sampathkumar, chair of infection prevention and control at the Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic, told the CBC that any spread creates an opportunity for the virus to mutate, which could undercut the effectiveness of existing vaccines.
"If we allow infection to spread unchecked, in a month or two months or inevitably at some point in time, we'll have another variant that completely escapes all the vaccine," Sampathkumar said.
"We will be back to square one. We [will] have an entire world's population that will be completely non immune and at risk for dying."
The first wave of vaccines has been effective against the variants, but the prolonged spread of the virus could imperil this. The Biden administration has pledged to share 80 million vaccine doses with other nations over the next month. This is a start, but far from adequate given the sheer volume of those who lack access to vaccines.
In the meantime, those of us who have been vaccinated can feel relatively safe going out in public without masks, though we should not succumb to the kind of hubris that history’s shows us can doom even the most effective disease mitigation and prevention efforts. COVID-19 is still with us, and will be for some time.