You literally cannot mandate somebody to wear a mask knowing
that that mask is killing people.
You are putting other people in danger.
You are.
[SCREAMING]
We're advocating for our rights
as granted to us under the Constitution.
I think we should follow the science.
Masks are not theater.
We don't have to accept the mandates.
Destroy them.
Masks have been controversial since the beginnings of masks.
Masks have always been political.
They have always meant more than protecting yourself
from infectious diseases.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
People did not want to wear their masks in 1918
any more than people want to wear their masks today
during Covid.
They were uncomfortable.
They made it hot to breathe.
There were people who claim that, just as some physicians
did, that they were useless.
Mask wearing became one of the significant element
of citizenship for Chinese people.
Both the personal morality and also the public side
are satisfied by mask wearing.
It's pretty clear that masking worked in 1918 and '19 as part
of a wider toolkit of public health intervention.
Fast forward to our time, because masking
has been so politicized, it's literally a political act.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[GREGORIAN CHANTS PLAYING]
BRUNO STRASSER: The medical use of masks
goes to at least the Middle Ages.
People were using pieces of cloth over their face.
Plague was, of course, one of the things
they feared the most.
The most famous and most iconic mask of all times
is certainly the plague doctor's mask.
We've all seen these.
They have a kind of long beak sticking out,
and supposedly they were worn by plague doctors in the Middle
Ages and later.
In 17th century Italy, plague doctors
had a really bad reputation.
All respectable doctors, when the plague arrived,
left for the countryside because they did not
want to die from plague.
So they had a very bad reputation.
And the first image of a plague doctor wearing a beaked mask
is a satire.
It's making fun of doctors, making fun of their greed,
making fun of the fact that they prey
on cadavers, on dying people.
And we noticed something pretty obvious.
All these images are exactly the same.
They're actually all copies of a single illustration or drawing
that dates from 1656.
These masks probably never existed.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Surgical masks started to be used
in the late 19th century in the surgical theaters
with the advent of germ theory.
They were not very widespread.
There were lots of physicians who didn't believe
that they were effective.
They really become used more widespread in the public health
context during the Manchurian plague in China in 1910, 1911.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
One Chinese doctor was sent to the region
by the Chinese government to try and control the outbreak.
The name of the doctor was Dr. Wu Lien-Teh.
BRUNO STRASSER: He was educated in Western medicine.
He knew about bacteriology, and he
believed that masks would protect physicians, nurses,
and everybody else from catching the plague
in the presence of patients.
Not everyone was convinced at the time.
One French doctor aggressively told Wu
that his masks were absolutely useless.
MENG ZHANG: The French doctor is very arrogant.
He doesn't believe he can get infected by the plague.
So he refused to wear a mask and went into a patient ward.
He got infected and dies a few days later,
and this becomes big news.
People are saying that, "Look at him.
He died because he refused to wear a mask."
So this becomes a turning point for many people there.
BRUNO STRASSER: The Manchurian plague
was all over the news in Europe and the United States
and across the world and really popularized the idea
that masks were an efficient technology to protect yourself
in cases of epidemics.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ALEXANDER NAVARRO: It's really with the 1918 pandemic,
especially in the United States, where mandatory face-mask use
becomes more widespread.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CHRISTOPHER MCKNIGHT NICHOLS: September, 1918,
the city of Philadelphia throws a Liberty Loan Parade,
the biggest parade in the history
of the city of Philadelphia, at the point
at which they know that in the Port of Philadelphia,
there is deadly influenza.
And public health officials were telling them
at the time to not go ahead and do the parade, but they did.
Within a week, they see hundreds of cases.
Within several weeks, all of the major hospitals in Philadelphia
are full.
And within a month, you're seeing catastrophic numbers
of deaths, as many as 700 a day.
So if you're a public health official in a city like Chicago
or San Francisco, they learned that they
shouldn't have super-spreader events, big parades.
They learned that they should close football games.
They should not have church gatherings,
that probably schools should be closed.
And among those measures were mask mandates.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Mayors and health officers and city councils
took enforcement of these masks mandates quite seriously,
and they ordered their police forces to go out
and to arrest anyone who was caught without their mask on
or anyone who was wearing it improperly.
CHRISTOPHER MCKNIGHT NICHOLS: But there
was pushback in virtually everywhere
that there were mask mandates.
[GUNSHOTS]
And, in fact, there were a couple
of high-profile shootings of people who resisted
being hauled into jail.
ALEXANDER NAVARRO: They had to move the courts to outdoors
because we didn't want to have indoor courts where people
were spreading influenza.
When Denver passed its mask mandate,
there were so many scofflaws that the mayor made a quip that
said it would take the 50% of people who were complying
with the mask mandate to arrest the other 50% who
weren't, if they were going to make any headway at all.
As San Francisco struggled to get its second spike of cases
under control, it issued a second mask mandate.
This one was so despised that there was a group called
the Anti-Mask League.
The so-called Anti-Mask League were
drawn from every sector of society,
who believed that the government didn't have a right
to tell them what to do.
The mask mandate went into effect for only one
week before it was rescinded.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The single biggest and most important
factor in how the U.S. dealt with the flu pandemic
was World War I. Once the U.S. is trying to fight the flu
was to fight it as if it were an enemy.
Those who opposed the draft, didn't show up for the draft,
were called draft slackers, were deemed as unpatriotic.
So, too, you saw the rise of a language of mask slackers
or mask scoffers.
ALEXANDER NAVARRO: Many of the PSAs
and the announcements of the time
are "Do your part because the boys are fighting over
in the trenches.
If you don't cover your cough, that's
as good as our troops being gassed
in the trenches in Europe."
[MUSIC PLAYING]
In 1918, Japan takes a look at the United States,
places like San Francisco, and their use of face masks
and decides that, well, if the United States is doing this
and the Western world is doing this,
this is something that we should emulate.
MENG ZHANG: Japan saw the mask mandates
as kind of a hygienic modernity, which means that a mask is
a modern Western style thing, especially
in San Francisco, such kind of a city that Japan
turned their view and wear masks during the Spanish flu.
And many counties in Japan have mask mandates
to ask people to wear masks.
ALEXANDER NAVARRO: After 1918, face-mask use in the United
States essentially drops to nothing, whereas in Japan you
see this drive to continue to use face masks to control
against seasonal allergies, industrial pollutants.
And that it's not just the sick who are wearing them,
but it's also the healthy.
A dangerous virus is spreading rapidly in China,
and U.S. officials are very worried that it
could come here.
A SARS-like virus has now reached the United States.
This is an evolving situation.
Literally every day, we learn a little bit more about it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
At no time in history have we had widespread mask mandates
as we had with the Covid-19 pandemic.
This was the first time in history
that you had worldwide mask mandates.
ALEXANDER NAVARRO: In places like China, in Southeast Asia,
Japan, Korea, et cetera, getting people
to wear face masks during Covid-19
was much easier because you have a society that is already
geared up to wear their masks in public.
The communication around this, as most of us remember,
exhibited what some people called a great flip-flop.
[KEYSTROKES]
The head of the CDC in the United States
first tweeted that masks should absolutely not
be worn by the general public.
Right now in the United States,
people should not be walking around with masks.
They were trying to protect the limited supplies of masks
for health care workers who need it the most.
[KEYSTROKES]
Within weeks, public health authorities, including the CDC,
had to backpedal strongly.
One of the important things that we're
emphasizing right now is our insistence
now on wearing masks.
So the communication in favor of public or community masking
was off to a very bad start.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[CROWD CHANTING]
Masking in the U.S. in 1918 and '19 and in 2020 to 2022
exemplifies the ways in which individuals relate
to the state, that individuals are more atomistic,
more partisan, more polarized, have made choices that
essentially prioritize their own individual rights over those
of the community.
BRUNO STRASSER: Masks have always been controversial.
And for this very reason, we are unlikely to agree any time soon
about masks.
The controversies about masks will continue and continue
and continue because they have never
stopped being controversial for their entire history.
[MUSIC PLAYING]