[mindslight]

I'm against mask mandates in principle, but it's hard to ignore that the strength of people listening to malevolent political figures has been much greater than the strength of people doing enlightened research. Maybe I'm just getting older and more conservative, shrug.

The best way of reconciling this seems to have been states issuing directives that didn't actually have the force of law. For example, the only "lockdowns" I know about the US were a few counties in CA. And yet people believed and acted as if there were such orders, even though they were really just strong suggestions to stay home.

FWIW the mask regime I was dealing with was being promulgated by a private company (the hospital), rather than the government. I'll critique any power structure regardless of its charter, but no political framework really has a good idea how to reel that type of thing in. To me the only real way to get past this is for people to become more intelligent so such top-down structure isn't seen as necessary in the first place.