Lifting the California mask mandate basically says chronically ill and disabled lives don’t matter

^{Photo by Kai Pilger on Unsplash}

As the omicron surge wanes, and the experts read the sewage like tea leaves, states from New York to California and everywhere in between have rushed to remove mask mandates, declaring that we have reached the magic inflection point between pandemic and endemic. And, once again, it will be the medically vulnerable who will suffer the casualties in this premature push for normalcy while COVID deaths in the U.S. still average near 2,500 per day.

One can’t help but recall the disastrous Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decision to recommend removing mask mandates in May 2021 and the subsequent walk back a mere two months later due to the delta variant. Even as we learn about long COVID and its disastrous effects, why do these policies reflect a greater concern for the robustness of the economy than the robustness of its citizens?

For me, an immunocompromised physician, the true kickoff to the pandemic was two Februaries ago when a colleague persisted in flouting our clinic’s coronavirus distancing guidelines by approaching too close and...