Biden, CDC silent as North Carolina lawmakers vote to ban masks

Biden's White House has made everyday survival hell for disabled people. Now the last tool in the toolbox is being targeted with zero pushback.

This week, North Carolina Republicans are voting to ban wearing masks in public. The bill passed in the State House easily, was amended and passed in the State Senate, and will next return to the House for a vote on the amended bill. The Republicans also hold a supermajority that could overturn a veto, and killed a Democratic amendment to allow masking for health reasons.

Hot on the heels of student encampments demanding that universities divest from weapons’ manufacturers responsible for mass murder in Gaza, Republicans jumped at the chance to criminalize two of their favorite punching bags, leftists and medically vulnerable people.

Disabled people and allies have met the news with chagrin, as Republicans carry out the long-predicted next step in their war on medically vulnerable people appearing in public and remaining alive.

Unfortunately, as Joe Biden jokes about refusing to put his mask on after a known COVID exposure, and left/labor pundits ignore the topic altogether, “allies” are few and far between. This combination of aggressive targeting and utter lack of solidarity is leaving those who rely on one-way masking to survive more at-risk than ever before.

One-way masking is the last tool available to the public to avoid continual COVID reinfections. Mask mandates have dropped everywhere, even in spaces where disabled people are forced to be in close quarters with infectious people for hours on end, as with air travel. (After a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down the TSA’s authority to mandate masking in April 2022, the Supreme Court actually affirmed the TSA’s authority to do so in October of the same year. Despite this, the Biden White House remained silent.)

Remote work options have been clawed back, with Biden’s White House among the employers throwing tantrums about telework. And despite the WHO finally acknowledging that yes, COVID is airborne, zero measures have been taken to begin upgrading air quality in public indoor spaces. No introduction of indoor CO2 limits, no mandated HEPA filtration, no exploration of Far UVC installation, all of which would significantly lower respiratory disease burden. Even next generation vaccines will no longer be available to uninsured Americans as of August 2024, when the Bridge Access program will inexplicably end.

Since it became clear (2021-22) that vaccines would not halt COVID transmission, that the virus would quickly mutate around vaccine protection, and that herd immunity would never be achieved, our government and media have worked assiduously to normalize constant reinfections and stigmatize those who object.

People who suggest that it is our governments’ role to mitigate disease are painted as annoying and weak, a narrative that came directly from libertarian think tanks. Those who attempt to protect themselves in the face of harsh abandonment are painted as paranoid and mentally ill. What’s happening in North Carolina this week is the unsurprising result of that years-long propaganda campaign.

Masks are a critical tool to protect disabled people from COVID, but many people either bought into anti-mask propaganda, or do not think COVID is dangerous. For a leftist- someone who expresses belief in community care and solidarity- being unmasked doesn’t only convey the sentiment “I don’t think I can be disabled by COVID,” it also broadcasts the accusation, “I don’t believe you can be disabled by COVID.” Being unmasked while COVID spreads unmitigated is an insistence on ones’ inalienable right to expose others to COVID without their consent.

Meanwhile, the latest CDC Household Pulse Survey found 17 million Americans currently living with Long COVID, and approximately 3 in 10 reporting having had Long COVID symptoms at one point. Viral persistence is currently a leading hypothesis for the development of post-COVID disease, and “persistence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA or particles in multiple tissues for prolonged periods in patients following SARS-CoV-2 infection, particularly in patients with long COVID, is now well documented.”

Mounting research shows that every COVID infection significantly damages cognitive function. Research led by Dr. Akiko Iwasaki at Yale School of Medicine continues to find immune dysregulation following COVID, and studies point to a 40% increased risk of developing autoimmune conditions after COVID. And it’s long been established that COVID substantially increases your risk of heart attacks, strokes, and other cardiovascular complications.

Additionally, along with remaining more acutely deadly than flu, the reality is that COVID reinfections happen much, much more frequently than flu. COVID mutates too quickly for vaccine protection to keep up, and rather than contracting the virus twice a decade, as with flu, people are stacking new infections within months. Right now, disease modelers are warning that the new FLiRT variants- KP.2 in particular- are highly immune evasive, meaning that many people who got the JN.1 variant this fall may be infected yet again.

Vaccines continue to reduce risks of hospitalization and death, but just 22% of American adults have received the XBB booster, and boosters lag behind variant evolution. For example, this fall’s updated booster was formulated against the XBB variants; by the time people received it, a descendent, JN.1, was predominant. CDC data shows over the 120 days following vaccination, efficacy against hospitalization among those who got the most recent booster was 50-53% among VISION Network patients and 43% among IVY Network patients. A 43-53% reduction is not nothing! But it’s certainly not the 100% protection people seem to assume they have, and 78% of American adults never received the most recent booster, meaning their protection against severe outcomes is significantly lower.

The XBB booster, still the most recent booster and likely to remain so until the fall, will also have a yet lower efficacy against KP.2, a descendent of JN.1, which looks likely to overtake JN.1 and cause a summer wave.

To read these studies, to become familiar with this data, is to know that a policy of continual, forcible reinfection with COVID is both unsustainable and cruel. For vulnerable people, it means constantly racing to stay boosted enough to acquire the measly 120 days of 50% reduced risk of hospitalization before the next variant emerges and relying on imperfect one-way masking in poorly ventilated, unfiltered spaces. And the society-wide detrimental outcomes can be seen in our overwhelmed healthcare systems, record student absences, and unprecedented worker illness.

But Democrats continue to stand behind their failed “vaccine-only” strategy (now, without vaccines!) because of the political impossibility of attempting to pivot. Plus, when you’ve had such blinding success mainstreaming far-right beliefs about illness building the immune system and public health being a personal choice, why change horses now?

Leftist organizations and pundits, usually harshly critical of Democrats’ willingness to throw marginalized groups under the bus for political points, are similarly quiet. The political calculations of leftists’ silence are less clear; for this reason, it’s been speculated that leftists with institutional power and media access simply do not want to practice the solidarity implied by acknowledging COVID isn’t over; namely, wearing masks in indoor spaces. That such a small hurdle is too high a price for the immediate, demonstrable prevention of death, disability, and shorter-term problems like wage loss is an indictment of the American left, indicating a shallowness and narrowness of political thought and action.

Lack of solidarity harms, first and foremost, the most vulnerable. The outcome of a broad mask ban in North Carolina will be harshest on frontline workers, on every vulnerable group including Black people, trans people, poor people and people living in the intersection of multiple vulnerabilities. But lack of solidarity as fascism rises never stops with the first group targeted. Right now, our government is playing a dangerous game of chicken with bird flu spreading unmitigated in our dairy cows. The one thing protecting us from an H5N1 pandemic - and bear in mind, the documented human fatality rate of this particular strain of flu is nearing 50% - is a tiny string of proteins that are currently being given millions of opportunities to randomly mutate and achieve human-to-human transmission.

Good luck stopping a highly transmissible, fully airborne virus when you still haven’t implemented airborne infection control in hospitals, spent four years convincing people illness is good for them, and banned masks outright.

Of course, you really don’t need the HPAI to mutate to find yourself in danger because of mask bans. Just ask Roger Malort, a former marathon runner and skier who just developed Long COVID after his fifth COVID infection. “In the first week of March, there was no more denying the condition I previously doubted was real,” he wrote in a column for the Aspen Daily News. Medically he, just like the other tens of millions living with Long COVID, should now try to avoid COVID reinfections. How exactly does our current public health approach to mitigating COVID-19 (none) support that?

Mandy Cohen, our current CDC Director, is from North Carolina. She has yet to comment, instead appearing maskless indoors in Arizona to proclaim “it’s hot” during “Heat Awareness Week”.

President Joe Biden has yet to comment.

The White House has yet to comment.

The Republicans are to blame for this draconian, murderous new ground they’ve gained in their noble fight against public health and protecting sick people. The North Carolina House and Senate voted along party lines for the ban. Among other things, I deeply fear that another Trump presidency could drag us into an anti-mask hell unlike anything we’ve experienced yet, with nationwide criminalization on the table.

But the Democrats have done nothing to stop the Republicans as they hauled the Overton Window further and further and further right, and in fact began enabling them by promoting junk science to justify repeated COVID infections in the Biden era. North Carolina Democrats’ role in “fighting” this mask ban is the bare minimum of insisting on what was once the far-right stance; public health is a personal choice, and people should be able to make personal efforts to not be infected with deadly and disabling illnesses in public spaces, if they want to.

It was Democrats who stigmatized masking among the majority of the country who previously wore masks and saw them as a positive marker of community care. It is the Democrats who made masking and COVID safety so politically untouchable that even progressive organizations demand in-person attendance in offices and scoff at requests for accessibility.

Dr. King said that in the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. Sadly, medically vulnerable people are under no illusion that the Democrats are any kind of friend. But their silence is surely loud and clear.