The World Health Organization lied about masks. President Trump’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and surgeon general lied about masks. Democratic and Republican lawmakers across the country lied about masks. All in all, it should come as no surprise that vast swaths of the public still distrust masks. And it’s a shame because it seems increasingly likely that if we all just wore masks, this whole pandemic shutdown could be over.

You don’t need more than a high school level of understanding of biology to understand that you can likely prevent the transmission of a respiratory disease by blocking your mouth and nose as you breathe and talk. French doctors from hundreds of years ago understood that they could probably mitigate the odds of them contracting the plague with a mask, so it’s rather astounding that the world’s leading health experts couldn’t figure out that wearing a mask probably could help and definitely couldn’t hurt.