What the Seat Belt Backlash Can Teach Us About Mask-Wearing

Americans have long pushed back against safety measures with clear benefits

Alexandra Sifferlin
Medium Coronavirus Blog
4 min readSep 22, 2020

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Photo by Zeesy Grossbaum on Unsplash

When the seat belt was first introduced to cars in America, it took quite some time to gain acceptance. Even though the seat belt was around in some form since the 1880s, even by the mid-1950s it was still highly uncommon for people to…

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Alexandra Sifferlin
Medium Coronavirus Blog

Health and science journalist. Former editor of Medium’s Covid-19 Blog and deputy editor at Elemental. TIME Magazine writer before that