By Layna Hong
Medill Reports

Five years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-mask legislation is sweeping across the country. With growing pro-Palestinian activism, many lawmakers argue that protesters are using masks to hide their identities.

But in Illinois, a bill proposed in February would protect the right to wear a medical mask in public. The Protective Medical Equipment Freedom Act could be the first of its kind in the country if it passes this legislative session.

Reporter Layna Hong spoke with Megan Doherty, who co-leads Care Not COVID, a Chicago-based advocacy group involved with this bill.

Layna Hong: So, Megan, what would this bill do in Illinois?

Megan Doherty: It would protect people’s right to be able to wear protective medical equipment, such as medical masks and respirators. It would make sure that nobody can retaliate against you, for example, an employer telling you that you have to do a different job because they don’t want customers to have to see the mask or something like that. You wouldn’t be able to have your hours reduced. You wouldn’t be able to be fired. No one could deny you entry or service to a particular business on the basis of you wearing a medical mask.

Hong: People getting discriminated against, how big of a problem is that?

Doherty: Yeah, unfortunately, even in a liberal state like Illinois, this sort of thing is already happening. People have been denied entry into some businesses. We have also heard some stories of people being hired for something and then being told, “Actually, no, you’re not allowed to wear a mask.” This person is vulnerable, or perhaps shares a household with people who are vulnerable, so they were not able to actually go to work for that job that they were hired for. I’ve heard of this happening more than once in Illinois.

Hong: And Illinois is one of the four states that has this proposed kind of law. In contrast, there are about 16 states that have anti-mask legislation. What do you make of that?

Doherty: This is why we have to do this. If it weren’t for all the states and municipalities that are passing or trying to pass mask criminalization or anti-mask laws or outright mask bans, then we wouldn’t have to counter that with proactive legislation to actually enshrine the right to wear a mask in states. That’s why we got started doing this, because a Chicago alderman tried to pass an ordinance criminalizing masking. Even though that failed, we still thought, “this could happen again. This could happen somewhere downstate, not just Chicago.” And we don’t want to be playing whack-a-mole with anti-mask laws into the future. So, can we future-proof this?

Hong: And why do you think there has been a nationwide push across so many different states to criminalize masking in public?

Doherty: I’m sure that it’s multifaceted. I think a large part of it is trying to quash the protests for Palestinian rights. Many protesters have been wearing medical masks in part because there has been outreach between our advocacy communities and talking about the intersection of disability justice with all these other issues. There’s no reason to potentially spread COVID or another disabling virus amongst us when we’re fighting for people’s rights anywhere. So I think a lot of this is an excuse to try to intimidate people who are trying to exercise their First Amendment right to protest.

Hong: What do you think of the argument that some lawmakers make that people just wear masks to try to hide their identities?

Doherty: I don’t think that’s true at all. I think that people have a right to protest and to not be surveilled, of course. But the point of a medical mask is for health reasons. It is to keep yourself from being infected with an airborne pathogen. It is to keep others from potentially being infected with airborne pathogens. It’s also protective against environmental hazards like pollution, whether it be …you know, we had these crazy dust storms in Chicago, weirdly, a few weeks ago. Or also when we had the wildfire smoke blowing in from Canada. That’s just a way to try to create a very anti-mask narrative. Masks are about public health.

Hong: And many of these anti-mask states have health exceptions. But Illinois’s bill includes this language about the right to mask “without obligation to disclose health status or any other protected information.” Tell me more about that language and what it does here.

Doherty: So the anti-mask laws that have health exemptions, they’re trying to put that forward as a way to say, “this is enough, it’s not going to actually cause any harm to the people who need to wear masks.” But there’s no real way to adjudicate that.

Are we going to start handing out disability ID cards that say “I am disabled,” so if someone stops you when you’re wearing a mask, you can whip out your little card in order to prove that you have a right to this health exemption? Are police officers somehow going to be equipped with medical training in order to decide who is legitimately disabled and who isn’t? That’s just opening up a very dangerous can of worms.

The other point is that you may have a very good reason to wear a medical mask even if you yourself are not disabled or immunocompromised, or you don’t think you are personally medically vulnerable. Maybe you live with someone who is medically vulnerable, or maybe you just have read the thousands of research papers about COVID and you don’t want to risk long COVID. So you wear a mask in order to protect yourself. Maybe you’re just engaging in community care and you don’t want to risk potentially spreading COVID to one of your neighbors. So health exemptions wouldn’t cover either of those very valid scenarios for wearing a medical mask.

Hong: Do people still have to be worried about COVID-19?

Doherty: It is still out there, it is still killing people and it is still disabling people. I think it’s important for people to understand that even if you are young and healthy, you can become disabled overnight. There are plenty of people who are young and healthy who have been athletes and who have suffered horrific consequences from COVID. Sometimes it’s only one or two infections that will do it to them. So every single infection that you can prevent, for yourself or for someone else, really does matter.

Hong: Why is there such a resistance to masking in public then?

Doherty: I have thought about this a lot. I think what it comes down to is that it’s inconvenient and annoying. People do not want to feel like they’re the only ones doing it. People do not want to stand out from a crowd. I think that that’s part of it.

And we really can’t let the wider media off the hook, which is why it’s so important that folks like you are willing to do stories about this. This (the wider media) is manufacturing consent. It’s creating this narrative in public discourse that COVID is over and done with and we don’t have to worry about it. That’s very dangerous. If people don’t see it in the news and they don’t hear about the fact that people are still being hospitalized and if they don’t hear people talking about long COVID, then it’s out of sight, out of mind.

The other facet of that is that I think that there is still a lot of unresolved trauma that people have. I mean, if you think about it, we don’t even have any real public memorials to the million-plus Americans who died. There’s no real public grieving at all, and masks are a symbol of that trauma for a lot of people. They’d rather stick their head in the sand and not think about it because it is so painful.

Hong: That trauma that you were talking about, is that one of the reasons behind discrimination against people who do wear masks?

Doherty: I think it’s really fear-based because if someone else is wearing a mask, it sort of subconsciously tells you that there is a threat and you are not protecting yourself, and that’s kind of terrifying for a lot of people. People have been yelled at, people have been coughed on, spit at. Someone in Chicago submitted a story to us, telling us about a very traumatic experience. It was right outside of Northwestern Hospital, someone was following them down the street and tried to rip the mask off their face.

Hong: Pretty ironic that it was outside of a hospital, right?

Doherty: Yeah, and Chicago is a liberal city in an overwhelmingly liberal state, and we’re still dealing with stuff like that. So it’s really awful to think about people in other places where it’s even worse than it is here. That’s one of the reasons why we want to pass this legislation. We cannot think we’re in this bastion of liberal or progressive thinking, so we’re fine. That’s the wrong way to think about it. I’m not sure that there’s anywhere that’s really and truly safe right now.

Hong: This bill was first introduced in February. Where is it now and what’s next for it?

Doherty: So it was assigned to the Judiciary Civil Committee. The way it works is you have to get passed out of committee in order to come to the House floor for a full discussion and vote. So, it’s stalled in committee. So that means that it got bounced back to what they call the Rules Committee. We’re going to reintroduce it in the veto session, which is a two-week period of time that will happen this November. So our goal is to still actually get it passed this legislative session instead of having to wait until next year.

Hong: And are there any opposition or challenges that this bill is facing?

Doherty: Well, at the moment we don’t have significant opposition. Certainly there were concerns raised by the Retail Merchants Association. They have federal requirements that you have to be able to positively ID people if they’re going to buy like an age-restricted product, so alcohol, tobacco or a firearm or something like that. So that was their concern. If someone’s coming in wearing a medical mask, what if we can’t tell that it’s really them, and we have a requirement by the federal government that we have to be able to positively ID people? So we’ve been putting our heads together and trying to come up with a way to make sure that they can fulfill whatever they are legally obligated to fulfill by the federal government, but still not put people who are medically vulnerable at risk.

Hong: And how can people get involved with this bill?

Doherty: The best thing to do is to go to the website. We created a whole webpage for this legislation. We have our contact information, and we also have ways that people can get involved in terms of filling out a support form so that we can be in touch with you if we have updates or a call to action about something. We also have a link to our Google form to submit a personal story, like if you have been harassed or retaliated against, pressured to remove your mask at work, denied service or entry, or anything like that. Any type of story that we can use to show Illinois lawmakers that these things are already happening to people, this is already a problem, and this is why we need to have a bill like that.

That’s Megan Doherty from Care Not COVID. We talked about a proposed Illinois bill that would secure the right to wear medical masks in public spaces.

Learn more about Care Not COVID’s work with the bill at pmefa.org.

Layna Hong is a graduate student at Medill in the social justice and solutions specialization. Find her on X @laynanhong or Instagram @laynareports.