California’s COVID emergency will be expiring at the beginning of next month, and this apparently is freaking out San Francisco’s public health establishment.

Both mask and vaccine mandates will expire, including for healthcare facilities. Few people are aware of this but the CDC’s own healthcare mask requirements were dropped months ago–back in September 2022, in fact. Chances are if you have been required to wear a mask to enter a doctor’s office or similar facility wearing a mask, it was your state or the facility that required it. The CDC no longer does.

San Francisco’s Health Officer Susan Philip knows better, and she has issued an order that makes it a crime to enter any of 15 types of facilities, including healthcare facilities, prisons, long-term care facilities, or 12 other similar institutions without a “well-fitted face mask.”

A crime. Meaning you can go to jail or be fined for not wearing a mask, despite the CDC and now the State of California admitting that this is unnecessary.

This is following The Science.

The science behind masking has always been weak to nonexistent. Back in the old days, when government officials didn’t consider it their duty to jerk citizens around and make fun of us, everybody in public health knew that mask mandates do not and cannot work to stop the spread of respiratory viruses.

When COVID hit, though, suddenly the surgeon general was instructing people on how to make masks out of T-shirts (he literally made a video on how to do so!)

A t-shirt. A mask out of a t-shirt. Bandannas work too!

Only a naif thinks that any of the people who were promoting such practices believed that they did anything to stop the virus. They did so to get people used to the idea of complying with the silliest orders, and it worked with many people.

San Francisco, a city where the only science anybody respects is chemistry since it is used to make meth and fentanyl, remains committed to masking apparently. Now perhaps it is true that Philip, unlike Fauci, Birx, and the former US Surgeon General, hasn’t got a clue about whether masks can or do work. In which case she may have the excuse of being an ignoramus rather than an evil control freak.

But I doubt it. I suspect she is just more of an evil control freak than even Gavin Newsom, which until now I thought would be impossible.

Live and learn.

It is tempting to simply shake one’s head and acknowledge that anybody who lives in a Blue-city hellhole deserves what they get–and they do since an overwhelming number of them voted for such idiotic governance. I would agree with this sentiment if we could require anybody who voted for this madness to live with it forever, or at least renounce Leftism before they leave for greener pastures.

But history shows that liberals vote for idiocy until they cannot stand to live with the consequences, then leave for nice, reasonably priced conservative places.

And then begin voting for liberals, destroying those places too. Massachussets exported its values to surrounding states as liberals fled the high taxes and excessive regulations, turning those states Blue too.

Liberalism is like a fungus that way. It spreads.

Glenn Reynolds has suggested a “welcome wagon” program to remind people why they left a Blue state to live in a Red one. Essentially the idea is to mitigate the problem of California or New York values becoming a norm in such states.

It’s a good idea, all things considered.

In the meantime, consider this: the San Francisco Health Officer is deathly afraid of COVID entering a prison, but apparently unconcerned about human feces being deposited daily on the streets of her city.