In another sign of changing attitudes to pandemic policy, infectious disease specialists writing in the Annals of Internal Medicine this month argued against the continuation of universal masking policies for doctors, nurses, and other health care workers.
In the article, the eight authors, who are infectious disease specialists associated with Harvard and Washington University medical schools among others, offer a timeline of the evolving responses to the pandemic. The timeline leaves out the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) initially confusing advice on masking but acknowledges that factors like the development of immunity, the evolution of the virus, and development of pharmaceutical “countermeasures” have fundamentally reshaped the landscape of the pandemic….