February 17, 2023 marks one year since New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham eliminated New Mexico’s indoor mask mandate. All reasonable New Mexicans are happy to be done with masks although you still see some wearing them (as is their right).
A recent, definitive study of masks by the Cochrane Library found (as we said long ago) that masks “made little or no difference” on COVID 19.
This is an anniversary worthy of celebration. The bad news? Two bills that would have limited the power of this and future governors in an “emergency” were killed in committee yesterday (with all Democrats in House Judiciary voting to kill them). After three years of COVID New Mexico is one of just a handful of states still in an emergency.
The Cochrane report is not “definitive,” as the authors of it even note: “The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions.”
Viruses, left unchecked and without any mitigation practices, will tend to proliferate and mutate, often becoming more devastating to human (and non=human) health. Decades of public health research and practice have found a number of interventions useful in limiting the spread and damage from viruses: quarantines, masking, vaccines, air filtering in the case of airborne viruses like COVID. None are perfect on their own, but the more that are used, the better chances of limiting the spread and deaths/long term disabilities caused by these viruses.
Given these facts, what does the Rio Grande Foundation propose in the case of the next pandemic? Doing nothing?
No response from the Rio Grande Foundation. Noted.