The famous science communicator, Carl Sagan, said "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
For Hong Kong, I say: "extraordinary mandates require extraordinary evidence". By any measure, three years of mandatory mask wearing is extraordinary. But by any measure, the evidence for the mandate is not.
The evidence from various studies supports both mask zealots and mask critics. If you want support for the proposition that masks work, you can find it in the studies; if you want support for the proposition that masks don't work, you can find it in the studies.
This is not "extraordinary evidence". This is, at best, equivocal evidence. And now we are extending mask mandates for the flu??
For those who say that masking is "no big deal", I say, yes, it is. For me — for many — it is. I can't recognise my friends who are masked. We know children suffer from manic masking. If "the eyes are windows on the soul", the face is the whole house, and I want to see the home.
I note that the hundreds of comments to this article are running massively against further extensions of our ludicrous mask mandates, so I am far from alone. For folks who want to mask, by all means keep doing so. We won't criticise you. Just let the rest of us get on with seeing people's faces again.
End the mask mandates!
Peter F. Etc…
