@rocketman: there is a difference between what the science says and what the government says. The government should be able to give advice, and the people should be able to choose whether to follow that advice.
If you’re worried about dying, wear a mask, if the mask helps, you have nothing to be worried about. If the mask, as has been proven, does absolutely nothing, a mandate is not going to improve its effectiveness.
As we’ve seen time and again, the mandates had the counterproductive effect. Because people don’t trust government and government is always the worst option because government can’t respond quickly and has no notion of unintended consequences.
For example the lockdowns, by locking down in the middle of summer, people were forced to stay inside longer and thus the virus spread more effectively through central airconditioning. Same with the masks, by forcing everyone to mask, there weren’t enough masks, so people got alternatives, which not only were proven to be not effective, some options like the neckscarf which the CDC recommended, turned out to amplify the problem if someone did sneeze. Besides that it gave people a false sense of security even though 99% of people do not know how to properly don masks and thus you had people with masks under their nose so people felt safe whilst they weren’t and others such as nurses, who train for over a year on proper mask wearing, were forced to work with actually infected people without a mask spreading the virus faster, while 99.9% of the population was not infected improperly wearing a pointless mask when they were in contact with people that were neither infected nor capable of spreading the disease.
Government is almost never the solution to any problem.