The petition to the City Council was straightforward: Enact a mandatory mask policy to combat the pandemic, or “the disease will come back again, and will exact a heavier toll than ever.”
Seven hundred residents, doctors and concerned citizens alike, signed the document. But the council members who heard their pleas wouldn’t have it.
One said masks left the wearer “breathing in the foul air which they exhale.” Another cracked he might be more sympathetic to the issue “if the doctors would come through and agree on some one thing, or if any of them could agree at all.” Still another said he would “not propose to take the advice of a lot of outsiders.”