The raucous tenor of Tuesday’s St. Louis County Council meeting is rooted in growing public confusion over vaccinations and mask mandates. Some of the confusion is deliberately sown by educated people who choose to make this a political issue. Others are understandably frustrated because they believed in the science and got vaccinated, only now to be told they must wear masks anyway. The public badly needs clarification from public health officials, but instead the conversation has turned to whether county Health Director Faisal Khan was the target of verbal and physical harassment after his defense of the new mask mandate at Tuesday’s meeting.
Khan was definitely heckled while speaking. If harsher forms of harassment occurred as Khan asserts, it deserves full-throated condemnation, particularly by Republican council members and politicians who have helped stoke public anger over the new mask mandate. There’s never a justification for hurling ethnic slurs or engaging in physical intimidation. That said, Khan was escorted outside at his request by police officers who certainly would have reacted if anyone had physically intimidated or assaulted Khan. Videos of Khan’s departure from the chamber don’t support Khan’s claims. Khan acknowledges giving a middle-finger salute to critics upon departing, and some kind of commotion developed outside after he left.
None of this helps advance his commonsense appeal for people to start masking up again. It also doesn’t help that neither County Executive Sam Page nor St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones sought support from their respective legislatures before jointly announcing their mask orders. If anything should’ve been learned from the past 16 months, it’s that lawmakers don’t like being dictated to. The greater the collaboration, the higher the likelihood of legislative — and public — buy-in. Instead, aldermen are angry, the County Council voted to reject Page’s mask mandate, and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt is suing Jones and Page to nullify their orders.
These are all distractions from what’s really important: After months of remission, coronavirus infections are sharply rising again. Hospital intensive care units are nearing capacity.
Mask mandates make common sense because, first of all, the delta variant now spreading across Missouri is far more contagious. A sneeze from someone carrying the variant in the lungs carries a thousand times more virus load. Masks help contain the spread and sharply limit the chances that people nearby might inhale the virus.
Although vaccines do offer protection, they are not foolproof. Besides, a person immunized against the virus can still carry it unwittingly. Teens and younger children are more likely not to be vaccinated. They and their vaccinated parents can become spreaders if they go out in public unmasked.
Enough with these distracting sideshows. It’s OK to paraphrase Missouri’s governor and shout out: Mask, we dang thee! But until this pandemic is truly vanquished, all should wear it to protect themselves — and those around them.
