While much of the rest of the country has realized that wearing masks does nothing to prevent the spread of COVID, many states have yet to get the memo. To them, mask wearing is less about preventing COVID and more about political signaling. Those who wear masks, or who support mask wearing, are signaling the fact that they’re sheep, willing to believe anything that is spoon fed to them by the government and its so-called experts.
Oregon is one of those states which has failed to learn from pretty clear experience that masking does nothing. In fact, the state is doubling down and intends to make its indoor mask mandate permanent. Oregon Health Authority officials are trying to assuage the public by claiming that permanent just means indefinite, not actually permanent. But that’s no consolation to the people who will be affected by the mandate, and the businesses who will once again be forced to be the state’s unpaid enforcement agents.
The rest of the country has long since realized that mask mandates accomplish nothing. And many states have realized that COVID is going to be with us as an endemic virus and that we cannot live in a state of abject fear and panic over something that has a 99.9% survival rate.
Cooler and calmer heads have prevailed in states like Florida and Texas, while blue states like Oregon try to maintain the fiction that COVID is uniquely dangerous and deadly. Will the citizens of those states continue to buy that story? Or will their experiences in free states allow them to realize that the only thing keeping them imprisoned is their own willingness to be deceived by their political leaders?
After nearly two years of a “pandemic” that has largely been much ado about nothing, we should hope that Oregonians will stand up and fight against a permanent mask mandate. Allowing government authorities to continue encroaching on our liberties by pretending this virus is uniquely dangerous would set a very dangerous precedent for the future.