Throughout the pandemic, few things have caused more divisiveness than the mandatory use of face masks as a preventative measure to reduce the spread of Covid-19.

At various times, simply questioning the effectiveness of masks or mask mandates could result in a social media suspension, such as when Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) received the YouTube boot for citing research suggesting cloth masks were ineffective at containing Covid (something CNN admitted months later).

A badge of honor. . . Left-wing morons on Youtube banned me for 7 days for a video that quotes 2 peer-reviewed articles saying cloth face masks don’t work.

If you want to see the banned video, go to Liberty Tree https://t.co/gsTUwuLZGL

—Rand Paul (@RandPaul) August 10, 2021

While mask mandates have largely receded in the United States, arguments about their effectiveness have not.

On Tuesday, President Biden’s Justice Department asked a federal appeals court to overturn a district court judge’s order that declared the government’s mask mandate illegal on planes, buses and more. transit, stating that the CDC had not solicited public comment prior to the order and failed to fully explain its reasoning.

The Justice Department’s timeline could be ominous.

On the same day, the DOJ appeal was filed, The New York Times published an article that explores the ineffectiveness of mask mandates. David Leonhardt, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, begins by exploring an apparent paradox involving masks observed by epidemiologist Dr. Shira Doron of Tufts Medical Center: “It is simultaneously true that masks work and mask mandates don’t. .”

I was an early adopter of masks – and they make intuitive sense – but a growing body of evidence shows that mask mandates don’t seem to make much of a difference at the community level. pic.twitter.com/wnfBUKcZuM

— Liz Highleyman (@LizHighleyman) April 13, 2022

The idea that mask-wearing is effective but mask mandates are not seems paradoxical indeed. But Leonhardt accepts evidence that masks can mitigate the spread of Covid even though he provides plenty of evidence to suggest mask mandates are ineffective.

In US cities where mask use has been more common, Covid has spread at a similar rate to mask-resistant cities. Mask mandates in schools also appear to have done little to reduce the spread. Hong Kong, despite almost universal mask-wearing, recently suffered one of the world’s worst Covid outbreaks.

Proponents of mandates sometimes argue that they have a large effect even if it is not evident in population-wide data, due to the number of other factors at play. But this argument seems unconvincing. .

After all, the effect of vaccines on serious diseases is extremely evident in geographical data: places with higher vaccination rates have suffered far fewer deaths from Covid.

While the idea that masks work while mask mandates don’t might seem like a paradox, there’s actually a very simple explanation for the phenomenon (although it’s not the only explanation).

As Leonhardt notes, it’s entirely possible that people who choose to wear masks wear them differently than people who are required to wear them.

“Airplane passengers take off their masks for a drink. Restaurant customers pass without masks as soon as they walk through the door. School children let their masks slide over their faces. Adults too: research by the University of Minnesota suggest that between 25 and 30 percent of Americans consistently wear their masks under their noses.

“Even if masks work, getting millions of people to wear them, and to wear them consistently and correctly, is a much bigger challenge,” wrote Steven Salzberg, a biostatistician at Johns Hopkins University.

Means and ends

There’s a popular adage among libertarians: good ideas don’t require strength. That’s a good line, but it’s also important to remember that force also produces dismal results. results.

Humans tend to forget it, but it’s an idea that Leonard Read took seriously. In his 1969 essay “Flowering Preexists in the Seed”, Read argued that one could reasonably predict the ends of a given action by the means employed.

Examine the actions – the means – that are implicit in achieving the goals.

Implicit in the collectivist approach… is the brains of the people… The control of the individual’s life comes from outside. [But for] an individualist… what matters above all [is] each distinctive human being.

Any conscientious collectivist, if he could… correctly assess the authoritarian means that his system of thought demands, would probably fail.

No matter how noble the ends, if the means are depraved, the result must reflect that depravity.

This is why Read believed it was important to focus on the means first and the ends second. Unfortunately, as a society we are increasingly taking the opposite approach – and we have seen plenty of evidence of this during the pandemic, including with mask mandates.

Certainly, this is not the only explanation for the apparent paradox involving the alleged effectiveness of masks and the alleged ineffectiveness of mask mandates.

Any thinker worth their salt will tell you if you have a paradox, the first thing to do is check your premises. It’s more than possible that one of Leonhardt’s premises — masks work, mask mandates don’t — is wrong. (Given that before and during the pandemic, the World Health Organization, the US Surgeon General, and the CDC all expressed doubts about the effectiveness of masks in preventing the spread of respiratory viruses, I bet the first is wrong about the second.)

Either way, it’s safe to say that Leonard Read would have been one of the few voices in the wilderness during the pandemic warning that non-pharmaceutical interventions (lockdowns, mask mandates, etc.) would have little effects and would likely cause serious damage. – and he would have been right.

Read knew that the bloom pre-existed in the seed, which means that the use of force, sooner or later, is likely to produce rotten fruit.

This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily e-newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free market news and analysis like this delivered to your inbox every weekday. This article originally appeared on FEE.org. Read the original article.