Unexplained and unsupported American protective (PPE) mask aversion

Querdenker (essentially “against-the-grain thinkers”).

My family has lived and traveled in Asia, especially when my husband was in the US Navy and stationed in Subic Bay, Philippines. From my experience, wearing protective masks in Asia is widely accepted. In fact, it is common to see children wearing masks.

This New York Times opinion echo describes how mask aversion seems to be an America anomaly - i.e. departure from the normal or common order, in Germany.

A world view about wearing masks.

Opinion echo by Alec MacGillis published in The New York Times.

BERLIN — You see it everywhere here in Germany, day in and day out: People taking the subway or bus or train put masks on as they prepare to board. And when they arrive at their stop or station and disembark, nearly all of them take the mask off, almost in unison.

For someone who arrived here after spending the first year and a quarter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, it is a remarkable sight: a communal, matter-of-fact approach to mitigation, turning what has become such an intensely charged symbol for Americans into a mere practicality.

This approach to masks and public transit is on display not only in cosmopolitan Berlin, but everywhere I’ve been in my reporting travels these past two months: I witnessed this effect in the eastern industrial city of Chemnitz, in the small western city of Erkelenz, and even in the rural eastern region of Lusatia, where the far-right Alternative for Germany Party, known here by its German initials as the AfD, had one of its strongest showings in the national elections last month. Mask on when you’re inside the train or store; mask off when you’re out of it.

Throughout 2020, and the first part of 2021, I traveled across the United States reporting stories, and wondered why it was so hard for the country to arrive at a sensible middle ground on COVID-19 measures.

Even after public health experts had established the vastly lower risk of transmission outdoors, I watched local officials close playgrounds and swimming pools, leaving young people with fewer options for low-risk activity and social contact. That was (mostly) the blue states. In one red town I attended a crowded memorial service in a windowless church where precious few people were wearing masks, and many shared embraces as though the virus simply didn’t exist. 

All or nothing, nothing or all.

And I saw how these wildly conflicting responses were fueling a vicious cycle of ever wider divides in behavior, with corrosive political side effects. For someone who had been documenting the country’s growing political fissures for more than a decade, it was not hard to discern what was happening: Reports of Trump supporters refusing to wear masks in big-box stores or indoor campaign events seemed to make liberals more inclined to wear masks even when outdoors with few people around; seeing mask wearing turned into a political statement, more partisan talisman than necessary tool, in turn made many conservatives less likely to mask up indoors when the circumstances justified it.

This was what Julia Marcus, a public-health researcher at Harvard Medical School, found when she interviewed mask skeptics last year: “They said they felt ridiculous wearing a mask when there are few people around, like outdoors or in a spacious store,” she wrote. “When I agreed that masking isn’t as important in certain settings, they became more amenable to wearing one when it matters most.” Overselling danger seemed, in other words, to have the opposite of the intended effect.

So it has been striking to be in a country where common-sense protocols generally prevail. It might be tempting to chalk up the uniformity of Germans’ behavior to their penchant for rule-following. This certainly helps explain why most Germans are observing requirements for masks on public transit or in stores, but it doesn’t really explain why — in contrast to what I witnessed in blue American cities — I have seen so few people going over and above the rules here, wearing masks outdoors or in other situations where they are not required.

And this tendency was reflected in the response to the coronavirus: The difference between the share of Germans on the ideological right and left who thought there should have been fewer restrictions on public activity was 20 percentage points, a Pew survey found early this summer. 

In the United States, the difference between right and left on that question was a whopping 45 points, by far the largest gap of any country surveyed by Pew.

This is not to say that Germany’s 83 million people are utterly free of disagreement on COVID. The rate of people with at least one vaccination shot — about 68 percent — is lower than that of many other European countries, barely ahead of the United States, and lower than that of many American cities with strict COVID requirements still in place. This is, in part, because Germany particularly lags on vaccinating teenagers, compared to other European Union members, but it is also a sign that the country has its share of dissenters. And there have been large protests against mask mandates, travel restrictions and the proliferating vaccine requirements for restaurants, sports events and other gatherings, a movement called Querdenker (essentially “against-the-grain thinkers”).

Notably, this movement has been more ideologically heterogeneous than equivalent protest groups in the United States, with some left-leaning vaccine skeptics and people upset about nightclub closings in the mix. (This diversity may partly reflect the role of the police in enforcing masking and other COVID rules — on several occasions, I’ve seen armed officers reminding transit riders on the platform to mask up — which can scramble the lines of resistance.)

To be sure, some of the anti-restriction rhetoric sounds similar to that in the United States — in Chemnitz, a supporter of the AfD who had come out to heckle the Green candidate for chancellor told me that “masks are humbug — they don’t help at all” and that mask mandates served no purpose other than keeping people scared. The very next day, the police in southwestern Germany arrested a 49-year-old man accused of fatally shooting a 20-year-old gas-station clerk who had told him to wear a mask in the shop. It was reportedly the country’s first instance of deadly violence apparently fueled by disputes over pandemic restrictions, a category of killing of which the United States has more than a half dozen examples.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are still some head-scratching restrictions here that challenge scientific guidance, such as the museums that have still disabled audio features on exhibits for fear of visitors touching the same headsets.

But German public health authorities seem to be making decisions with less concern than their American counterparts are about whether they will somehow abet right-wing narratives. For instance, requirements for proof of vaccination here in Germany can also be satisfied by showing that you’ve already had COVID, following the studies that have shown prior infection to provide strong protection. In the United States, public health officials seem to worry that anything validating anti-vaxxer claims about natural immunity will reduce vaccination rates. And education officials here speak much more freely about the downsides of masks in classrooms as they now start lifting school masking requirements.

The role of the media undoubtedly plays a role, as well — there are far, far fewer fear-stirring articles or segments in the national press or broadcast news here about, say, the potential risk that the coronavirus poses to children.

No, it seems to me that the likelier explanation for the less polarized approach to virus mitigation behavior is that Germany is, well, much less polarized. Politics are so consensus-driven here that for the past eight years Germany has had a governing coalition consisting of the two largest parties.

The overall effect is of an environment set at a lower temperature, far closer to normalcy, where the public space is not forever on the verge of flaring into a divisive battleground of signaling, judgments and resistance.

Meanwhile, the reports keep coming from what looks like an ever more inflamed landscape back home: incidents of resistance rage like the two people arrested at the Nashville airport in late August for refusing to wear masks on separate flights; officials in high-transmission areas barring mask mandates in schools while officials in low-transmission areas require schoolchildren (and college students) to wear masks even outdoors; a former Obama administration cabinet member comparing Americans opposed to mask requirements to the suicide bomber who killed about 170 Afghans and 13 American troops in Kabul. The middle ground seems more out of reach than ever.

One day during the just-concluded election season here, I went to see a Berlin campaign rally for Olaf Scholz, the chancellor candidate of the center-left Social Democrats and, it now appears, the likely successor to Angela Merkel. Mr. Scholz invoked the unity and sense of purpose that Germany had demonstrated during the pandemic as his model for bringing the country together to confront other challenges, such as climate change. “We saw in this corona crisis that we can hold together, that solidarity is possible in this country,” he said.

I couldn’t help thinking that the line seemed far more plausible here than if used in the United States.

A few weeks later, I went to a different campaign rally, for the far-right AfD in Lusatia. Hundreds of people gathered in a square in the small city of Görlitz to see the party’s two top national candidates. Nearby were gathered dozens of counterprotesters, with police officers on hand to keep the two groups separate.

None of the AfD supporters wore masks. Virtually all of the counterprotesters did, a rare incidence of outdoor mask wearing. Here, at last, in the most acute of political circumstances, was a stark COVID culture-war contrast.

It felt almost like home.

Alec MacGillis, a reporter for ProPublica and a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, is the author of “Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America.”

Baltimore area Kushner real estate must disclose investors

Who is investing in Jared Kushner's Baltimore real estate?

Judge says the Kushner Company Must Reveal Identities of Real Estate Partners ~ By Alec MacGillis

The ruling comes in a class-action lawsuit filed by tenants of Kushner-managed apartment complexes in the Baltimore area.

The lawsuit was filed in Baltimore Circuit Court Wednesday morning by two plaintiffs:  Tenae Smith, who lives in the Dutch Village apartments in Northeast Baltimore, and Howard Smith, (not related) who lives in the Carroll Park apartments in Middle River.

Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner's local real estate ties

A federal judge in Maryland ruled Friday that Jared Kushner’s family real estate company could not keep secret the identities of its partners in Baltimore-area apartment complexes that are the subject of a class-action lawsuit by tenants.

The class-action lawsuit was filed in September, following a May article co-published by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine that described how Kushner Companies have used highly aggressive tactics in pursuing payments from tenants and former tenants of 15 large apartment complexes it owns and manages in the Baltimore area.

Jared Kushner's real estate firm seeks the arrest of tenants to collect rent

The lawsuit, filed in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City, alleges that the Kushner Companies’ real estate management arm and related corporate entities have been improperly inflating payments owned by tenants by charging them late fees that are often baseless and in excess of state limits and court fees that are not actually approved by any court. The suit alleges that the late fees and court fees set in motion a vicious cycle in which rent payments are partly put toward the fees instead of the actual rent owed, thus deeming the tenant once again “late” on his or her rent payment, leading to yet more late fees and court fees. Tenants are pressured to pay the snowballing bills with immediate threat of eviction, the suit alleges.

Kushner Companies and its co-defendants sought to have the case transferred from state court to federal court, which would spare it from having to face an all-Baltimore City jury. 

To have this transfer approved, the defendants needed to show that none of their ownership partners were residents of Maryland. The defendants requested that their submission of the list of partners be sealed from public view, citing the high degree of media interest in Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser.

“Given the tenor of the media’s reporting of this case, including politically-motivated innuendo no doubt intended to disparage the First Family, there is foreseeable risk of prejudice to the privacy rights and reputations of innocent private investors,” wrote Westminster Management, Kushner Companies’ real estate management arm, in a court filing in November.

This request to seal the partners’ identities was challenged several weeks later in a joint filing by ProPublica, the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and Baltimore TV station WMAR-TV. They argued that the press had a “presumptive right” to view court documents, and that the Kushner Companies had not identified the “compelling government interest” that is required to block public access.

In his ruling Friday, U.S. District Court Judge James K. Bredar stated that the high level of public interest in Kushner and his business associates if anything enhanced the case for maintaining access to the identities of the defendants in the case.

“The Defendants are no doubt correct that the presence of the Kushner (and therefore Trump) families in this case has raised its profile and attracted significant, though perhaps not ‘unprecedented,’ media attention,” Bedar wrote. “But increased public interest in a case does not, by itself, overcome the presumption of access. In fact, it would logically strengthen it, particularly when the interest is due to the presence of important public figures in the litigation. 

In such an instance, the public’s desire to evaluate the Court’s decision-making is likely augmented. And beyond this apparently inevitable media scrutiny, Defendants have largely relied on ‘vague superlatives’ and insinuations instead of demonstrating specific harms.”

Several recent news reports have given a hint of just how far-reaching the network of investors in the Maryland apartment complexes could be. The New York Times reported earlier this month that Kushner Companies last spring secured a $30 million equity investment in the Baltimore complexes and others of its holdings from Menora Mivtachim, one of Israel’s largest financial institutions, just as Jared Kushner was about to make his first official visit to Israel as President Trump’s designated broker of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. More recently, a New Yorker article describedthe Kushner Companies’ aggressive pursuit of Chinese investors in its real estate ventures.

In his ruling, Bedar gave the defendants until Feb. 9 to provide the list of their ownership partners. The Kushner Companies could opt instead to return the case to the Circuit Court in Baltimore, if the firm decides the downsides of having to disclose the investment partners in the complexes outweigh the downsides of having the case heard by a Baltimore jury.

A request for comment from Kushner Companies’ spokesman was not immediately returned Friday afternoon. A lawyer for the plaintiff tenants, Andy Freeman, said he and his colleagues on the case had not yet gotten any indication of how Kushner Companies planned to proceed.

“We’re pleased with the ruling. We don’t think that parties to federal litigation should be able to conceal their identity,” Freeman said. He added: “This is just the first step in moving toward justice for the tenants.”