April 2, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF
The Problem With Face Masks and Vaccinations
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
On Thursday, my wife and I got our second COVID-19 vaccination. I would like to go to a bar, strike up a conversation with a stranger, and share some lies with him. I assume this isn’t going to happen. The vaccine is incredibly successful, we’re told, which I would expect given the amount of money spent by my government in developing it. But my government is telling me that in spite of the vaccine nothing will change. I must maintain social distance, wear a face mask and so on. The vaccine’s creators say it’s unclear if the virus can still infect someone. That would seem pretty easy to find out: I could breathe on a healthy young doctor and see if he gets sick. I’m obviously missing something. It’s got to be possible to figure out if I’m still infectious. I would have thought they would have checked this out on a gerbil or a lab rat. More seriously, though, the continuous usage of masks can have unintended consequences.
As I’ve noted before, face masks and social distancing were the only solutions the medical community could devise when COVID-19 first struck with all its fury. It continues to be a favored adjunct to vaccination. It is often said that wearing a mask and maintaining distance is a trivial burden to pay for safety. But I take issue with that argument. When human beings meet for the first time, they tend to face each other when they speak. Hell, so do people who have known each other for a while. Talking is far more complex than merely hearing words. Humans communicate much with facial expressions. Take the statement: “George, you wrote a great book.” (This is something I can’t hear often enough.) That statement can mean many things. It might be meant sarcastically, with a curl of the lip. It might be genuine praise, with the mouth framed in a respectful fashion. Or it might be a comment by someone who never read the book who wants something from me, with the smile framed in an obsequious manner.
Humans use the face to identify threats; criminals wear masks as much to hide their intentions as they do to conceal their identities. Someone enraged at you or planning to harm you looks a certain way, someone delighted to see you another. It is not only the mouth that speaks to you. The muscles in the face can reveal tension or pleasure. The nose moves. The eyes reveal much. Facial expressions are much harder to interpret behind a mask. If you are very bored, ask your spouse to put on a mask and interpret their true feelings by the eyes alone. It can be done, but without context the probability of being wrong soars. The mouth, nose and lower half of the face are the checksums on what is said, and the mask impedes that greatly.
Consider this. I spent most of my high school career trying to kiss girls – admittedly with minimal success. My failure drove home the importance of kissing as part of the process of coming to terms with the fact that there are boys and girls and that from the first kiss you will be living with that awareness as it teaches you to deal with lust and its relationship to love, one of the most important passages of the human soul. How do you do that with a mask on?
Consider social distancing. It makes impossible the fights boys must have to learn how to settle matters later without fights. I recall girls putting their heads together and giggling. I was never sure about what, but the old rule is: If you can’t spot the jerk at the poker table, it’s probably you.
You can text or phone, but the ability to see those you speak to, or stand close to a stranger you just met, is indispensable to being human. So by definition, masks and distancing disrupt the process of being human. Ironically, if someone is speaking with a well-made mask, they are frequently incomprehensible unless you are a lot closer than six feet apart. The mask and social distancing tend to be mutually destructive.
Now, if these measures are the only ways to avoid mass death, then obviously they are necessary. But the assertion that these measures protect without cost is untrue. On multiple levels they impose costs that we may not yet understand. Learning how to play as a child, exploring the limits of tactile interaction, is essential to adulthood. My argument is not against these measures, if they are truly vital, but the cost-benefit must be addressed, and if the measures involve real costs, they should be imposed cautiously. Finding out if the vaccine makes me not infectious must be figured out quickly, as I fear the costs of a year of massive social and economic disruption are mounting. If the mask is essential to prevent another surge, so be it. But do not treat social distancing and masking as a trivial matter.
