Why I'm now mindfully and consciously taking this off, everywhere I can

Two weeks after my second Moderna COVID vaccination shot, today I’m now “fully marinated,” as one of the brilliant young people at my agency terms it. And I will put out there that I personally now think it is important for me not to wear the mask you see pictured above in all the places where I am now allowed not to wear it.

I’m a walking symbol that, thanks be to God and to scientists, vaccines work. I believe that vaccination is what good citizens do for themselves and their children as part of their contribution to a civilized and healthy society.

Of all the nauseating, insane ways that our country has been inflamed and polarized in recent years, the cynical politicization of masking has especially galled me. Public health experts’ best collective judgment in the winter of 2020, in a time of pandemic and in a context of uncertainty, was that we should start wearing masks. Not spraying your spit and snot on other people during a pandemic when you never know if you’re infected with the novel coronavirus seems to me like good manners, at the least, and in the spirit of my and so many other religions, a tangible expression of the great commandment to love your neighbor.

Public health experts’ best collective judgment now in my home Commonwealth of Massachusetts and across much of our country is that there are many contexts in which we who have been vaccinated no longer need to wear our masks, and there remain places and situations in which it’s reasonable to allow the property or facility owner to ask other people to wear masks or follow other precautions because of the refusal of some people to get vaccinated and because requiring “vaccine passports” for all adults raises what I think may be genuine and fraught civil-liberties issues. (Yes, Dr. Fauci and the CDC told the nation a white lie at the very beginning about the need for masks in order to ensure that supply would be available for front-line healthcare workers while production capacity for masks for everyone else got ramped up. I’d have counseled them to take a different tack, communications-wise, and appeal to people as patriots to ensure front-line workers got their masks first and recommend interim home-grown alternatives before buying out all the N-95's. That said, we’ve been told far worse lies--for far worse reasons--by our nation’s leaders throughout my lifetime and before.)

If, heaven forbid, COVID comes roaring back in Massachusetts and public health experts’ best collective guidance, in a context of uncertainty, is to wear the mask again, I will wear the mask again. For now, my view is we who can safely become walking advertisements for the value and liberation of vaccination should do so if we wish to do so.

After 15 months of treating every sidewalk encounter with another human being as a potential brush with death, one more thing I am thinking: Other people now very much need to see us looking in their eyes and saying an unmuffled hello. And smiling at them.

(Originally posted on Facebook, and I had some requests from folks to cross-post on LinkedIn.)