At this point, it’s all political. The anti-maskers want masks gone as a statement that they were right all along, and using masks really was some unprecedented assault on liberty.
Elsewhere I’ve posted this link to the weekly influenza report here in Canada.
Figure 3 compares the four years prior to the pandemic with the flu seasons in 2020-21 and 2021-22. We’ve essentially wiped out influenza for two years in a row now, even with the half-assed masking and social distancing we’ve been doing. There is data out there showing similar results in the US, at least for 2020-21. It’s not as nicely formatted as that Canadian chart, but it tells essentially the same story.
In any normal year, “Holy shit we wiped out influenza!” would be a huge, positive news story that would be celebrated by anyone who wasn’t an outright misanthrope, but because it happened during the pandemic, almost no one noticed, and even if they did, they’d still react with a “Screw you! You can’t make me wear a mask!”