One of the founders and a vocal proponent for change is Dr. Lucy McBride, an internist in Washington, D.C., who works as a concierge physician—usually a doctor with limited clientele who does not accept insurance. In addition to ending mask mandates in schools, she told me, she wants required quarantines to end, as well as testing for asymptomatic children. “The problem right now is we’re isolating and quarantining healthy kids,” she said, arguing that the decision to quarantine a child who is exposed to the virus should be up to parents and pediatricians. (Public health experts have told me this policy would likely lead to further spread, since people are highly infectious before they ever show symptoms. This could be particularly problematic if masks are not required in classrooms.)
Other members of the group include Dr. Scott Balsitis, a virologist who develops antivirals and monoclonal antibodies for Gilead Sciences, which makes the Covid antiviral remdesivir (Balsitis did not return interview requests by press time), and Dr. Vinay Prasad, a hematologist and oncologist who joined the group shortly after it was formed. Prasad also writes for the Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research, a group advocating a more libertarian approach to the pandemic. (After this article was published, Prasad clarified on Twitter that the pieces on Brownstone’s website are republished from his Substack newsletter.)* Brownstone’s donor breakdown is unclear, but its founder consults for the American Institute for Economic Research, which receives funding from the Charles Koch Foundation and a Koch-funded public relations firm Emergent Order. One Koch-backed group has been linked to school unmasking efforts, and Emergent Order also aided the Great Barrington Declaration—an early (and widely denounced) campaign to drop Covid precautions under the theory that “focused protection”—i.e., precautions only for the vulnerable—would be sufficient.
These individuals are part of the growing throng of voices calling for a return to normal immediately. For if the past few weeks of newsletters, op-eds, and magazine pieces lamenting lingering precautions have made anything clear, it’s that the days of “listen to the epidemiologists” are over. The chorus of high-profile demands for an immediate cessation of Covid-19 precautions, at least in certain corners of the nation, is growing louder—even as the public popularity of such measures holds steady.
Tyler Black, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and suicidologist at BC Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, hadn’t heard anything about the Urgency of Normal group or its “tool kit” until it came out. But when he saw it go up on Twitter, he was appalled. “Their document was so poor, with so many mistakes, that it required immediate public correction,” he said. He messaged some of the signers directly on Twitter, he said, and when no one responded, he went public, in a detailed Twitter thread that focused on his area of expertise: child mental health. Several other subject-area experts did the same, debunking comparisons to the flu and diving into the dismissal that many kids are fine. The central problem he saw was that the group claimed that masks harm children’s mental health and social development—something he’s seen no evidence for in his own work.