I was hooked to a ventilator, fighting for life. Talk to me about ‘personal freedom’

The people protesting the reinstatement of a local mask order called masks “muzzles, dirt shields and germ traps.” They said masks didn’t work, would actually make people sicker, and complained about their civil liberties being infringed.

I’m talking, of course, about the Anti-Mask League of San Francisco during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.

History remembers the league as a small group of extremists. But those century-old arguments sound awfully familiar to anyone following the current debates over local mask orders in and around Kansas City. Except today’s anti-mask rhetoric is arguably more unhinged. Maybe the San Francisco group wasn’t prone to threatening civil war like today’s anti-maskers, because back then, there were people who remembered the horrors of the actual Civil War. Or maybe its members just weren’t exposed to as many conspiracy theories because they didn’t have the internet. In any case, now would be a good time for our leaders to calm people down, rather than stoke anger and resentment for political gain.

Instead, politicians across the country, including in Kansas and Missouri, have leaned into the tyranny talk, introducing hyperbolic anti-vaccine legislation and trying to prevent local officials from doing anything to quell COVID-19. Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt seems to be making resistance to local mask orders the central argument for his U.S. Senate candidacy. Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt — coincidentally also seeking higher office — pushed to restrict one of the most mundane public health measures: contact tracing (finding out who infected people have been close to and warning them they may have been exposed).

For a certain subset of the population, everything related to COVID is tyranny now. Mask orders are tyranny. Vaccination requirements are tyranny. Contact tracing is tyranny. Which is odd, because all of these strategies have been used to prevent other diseases going all the way back to the Spanish flu.

On rare occasions, local health officials have even enforced quarantines during previous outbreaks. That seems unthinkable in our current environment, but before COVID, public health interventions didn’t raise much of a fuss (or objections from state attorneys general). Maybe that’s because they were done on a smaller scale because the outbreaks were smaller than our current one. Or maybe it’s because, until recently, members of both major political parties generally agreed that suppressing infectious disease is a legitimate and even essential function of government, and not remotely comparable to “tyranny.”

But COVID is politicized, so now we have an environment in which public health is pitted against “freedom.” That ignores two hard truths: Personal liberty with no sense of civic responsibility is just selfishness, and no one has much freedom in an intensive care unit, regardless of what the government is or isn’t doing.

Here’s a personal example: When I was a senior at the University of Kansas in 2004, I contracted a form of bacterial meningitis that, overnight, sickened me so badly that I had to be airlifted to an ICU. The student health center and local health department quickly began an extensive effort to trace all my recent contacts. To my knowledge, no one objected. I certainly didn’t. By the time I regained consciousness and found out about it, I was just immensely grateful they had prevented more people from getting sick.

While the contact tracing was going on, I was in a hospital bed with about a half-dozen tubes running into my body, including one that was attached to a ventilator because I was in lung failure. I couldn’t leave my bed or even talk. Any brief moment of semi-consciousness I had during those three weeks was dominated by a constant gagging sensation because of the breathing tube snaking down my throat. During that time, I was reduced to precisely one freedom: the freedom to go off life support and die.

Compared to that, being required to wear a mask in the grocery store for another month doesn’t seem much like tyranny.

Andy Marso is a former health reporter for The Star and the author of “Worth the Pain: How Meningitis Nearly Killed Me — Then Changed My Life for the Better.”

This story was originally published August 27, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "I was hooked to a ventilator, fighting for life. Talk to me about ‘personal freedom’."