"surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr's country house, the fellow scientist visiting him exclaimed that he did not share the superstitious belief regarding horseshoes keeping evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr snapped back: "I don't believe in it either. I have it there because I was told that it works even when one doesn't believe in it at all." This is indeed how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware of their corrupted nature, but we participate in them, we display our belief in them."[1]
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859145
[1] - http://brooklynbooktalk.blogspot.com/2010/02/its-ideology-st...
Except we're talking about Zizek! This is not Michel Foucault ("Everything I say is just a toolbox, you can use what you like, discard what you don't"). He does not share your rather postmodern outlook on discourse and language, if he did, if his work was meant to accede to any notion of "Oh, words and statements are free-floating, unbound to their context, meaning is indeterminate, there are only different perspectives", etc, his whole platform would fall apart; he intends the opposite of what you're talking about with his speech. He literally defines the work that he does as partisan without ambiguity. There are pages spent in his books and multiple reminders given at his in-person lectures on this point that anything such is an objection to his platform.
It's either fidelity to his meaning, which, to be clear, is not some smarmy, one-off that misapplies his example to make a silly point about not continuing to wear masks (which, by the way, is a perfectly quantifiable question rather than a 'merely ideological' one), or the information conveyed means nothing at all. You either get that he deploys examples like these, and he has a billion over the course of work (it just so happened this one had language useful to grandparent's intended meaning), to illustrate his interpretation of commodity fetishism, the basis for his critique of ideology, or you've rendered all of his meaning bankrupt. So, yes, in his case, its either/or, and that's by design!
I have noticed that wealthy, educated, conservatives (for tax benefits) work hard to justify and provide some vaguely scientific and logical grounding to all kinds of weird conservative talking points. This might be by punching hard at some corner of the liberal/scientific consensus on an issue that is not quite well developed or the audience lacks full detail on. This equalizes both liberal and conservative positions as some what unscientific, while the reality is quite opposite. You will never find rayiner attack conservative talking points, only liberal ones.
You think you are in a scientific discussion, but you are actually participating in a political one.
As to your climate change example—here, the US is again the odd one out. Other developed countries are not masking toddlers, like the CDC recommends.
This same line of argument was used to question climate change for decades and to support the argument that we should not take any aggressive measures to avoid it.
There's a good chance wearing masks in schools makes the community safer from serious illness. And the risk in wearing masks if they prove to be useless is...what exactly? That masks are a little uncomfortable?