The wheels of justice grind slowly but grind exceedingly fine.

Frankly I don’t believe that famous quote, having observed too many instances of the gap between the law and justice yawning exceedingly wide and never being reconciled in any time frame that mattered to people. The only saving grace being that it applies to when justice is served and when it is not, although even then there are cyclical periods of time for each.

In this case a couple of days ago US District Court Judge Kathryn Mizelle, ruled that the CDC failed to properly explain its decision to impose the mandate or follow proper rule making procedures and that therefore the Federal mask mandate could not be legally imposed in airports, planes and other transport:

Almost immediately, Alaska Airlines announced that masks would be optional for travelers and employees alike. United Airlines quickly followed suit, announcing that masks were no longer required on domestic flights and select international flights, depending upon the arrival country’s requirements. American Airlines, Delta Airlines, or Southwest Airlines — the three carriers with the most passengers pre-pandemic — also made masks optional on Monday night.

You can get a sense of the reaction with the announcement being made mid-flight in some cases. Nice to see the reaction of the crews as well…

Now the news is not all good. Some individual states are continuing with the insanity in the public transport systems they control, and while the Biden administration immediately announced a cease fire they have not surrendered and may appeal the decision to a higher court. To which my response is Lose Harder In November, Assholes. Also, Judge Mizelle accepted the CDC’s argument that masks may help prevent infection, despite them having accepted that the common, disposable cloth masks do not. In which case she may wish to read this article on the failure of masks and look at these graphs from it:

The [left] graph tracks the results of a natural experiment that occurred nationwide during the pandemic. Eleven states never mandated masks, while the other 39 states enforced mandates. The mandates typically began early in the pandemic in 2020 and remained until at least the summer of 2021, with some extending into 2022. The black line on the graph shows the weekly rate of Covid cases in all the states with mask mandates that week, while the orange line shows the rate in all the states without mandates.

As you can see from the near identical trajectories of the lines, mask mandates made no difference, and certainly did not control the virus. The article waspishly notes the early triumphant squawking of the MSM for states with extremely high mask compliance – that went on to suffer terrible C-19 case and death surges.

[The right graph] compares Germany with Sweden, the media’s Covid villain for refusing to lock down or mandate masks. Sweden’s initial Covid surge was blamed on those lax policies, but Sweden stuck to them and actually discouraged masks in most situations. As indicated on the graph, surveys during the pandemic showed that fewer than 10 percent of Swedes bothered to wear masks. In Germany, by contrast, more than 80 percent did so, but look at the similar trajectories of the daily Covid death toll in both countries from the summer of 2020 through March of this year.

I’ve already covered much of this ground in previous posts (The Mask Narrative crumbles contains links to other such posts), including graphs for places like Hawaii as far back as 2020 that showed the futility of masks.

The article notes that a resistance to mask mandates went back even further and very much included Public Health bodies.

In their pre-Covid planning strategies for a pandemic, neither the Centers for Disease Control nor the World Health Organization had recommended masking the public—for good reason. Randomized clinical trials involving flu viruses had shown, contrary to popular wisdom in Japan and other Asian countries, that there was “no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing transmission,” as the WHO summarized the scientific literature. The pandemic planners at the United Kingdom’s Department of Health had reached a similar conclusion: “In line with the scientific evidence, the Government will not stockpile facemasks for general use in the community.”

In going with politics instead of science they’re hardly alone. If you’re a subscriber to the NYT (and we know some of our readers proudly are) then you’ll probably be shocked and surprised to find that the following Tweet…

… actually resulted in a NYT reporter, one Victoria Kim, trying to contact him about the horror, only to be informed that it was satire. Ms Kim was raised in Seoul and is a Harvard graduate in history.

She is also an utter fucking moron.

But as usual she and the NYT were running with the Left’s narrative, in this case masks, and you can see why in The 5 Most Unhinged Responses to the End of the Travel Mask Mandate, although I prefer humourist James Lileks list and his takes on them:

I know, I know, my mask protects you, your mask protects me. If you are wearing a mask, the virus cannot pass through it. But if you are not wearing a mask, the virus can float over to where I am, and pass through my mask.

They walk among us, and from my everyday observations I’d say we have a higher proportion in NZ.