A lot can change in three months. In March, the message from the United States government, communicated through individuals including Surgeon General Jerome Adams and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, was that people should not wear masks when they go about their daily activities outside their homes.
Then, in April, the US government and its high profile medical “experts” including Fauci and Adams turned on a dime, urging people to wear masks. And, in May, citing the US government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) new pro-mask guidance, stores such Costco as well as state and local governments including, as of Friday, Virginia imposed mask mandates on their customers and people in their geographic jurisdictions, respectively.
The message transitioned from “do not wear masks” to “you must wear masks” all in three months, and all the while the prominent propagators have insisted that the morphing message is based on science.
Give me a break with the science platitudes. There is no clear evidence masks will help people shopping for groceries or doing other daily tasks be healthier. Indeed, some evidence suggests that using masks will help spread coronavirus and cause other health problems as well. Plus, over this time of transitioning from an anti-mask recommendation to pro-mask mandates it has become increasingly obvious that the health risk from coronavirus is much less than people had been told by many politicians and media stories at the beginning of the coronavirus crackdown in America.
The changing mask policy is about controlling people’s activities. You can dress authoritarianism in jargon of science-based public health policy, but that does not change its nature.
“When you’re in the middle of an outbreak,” said Fauci in an early March 60 Minutes interview at CBS television, “wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is.” He continued, stating that “unintended consequences” of wearing a mask, including coronavirus transmission danger from people “fiddling” with their masks and touching their faces, weigh against wearing a mask to protect against coronavirus.
A few days earlier, Adams was declaring at Twitter, “Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!” and elaborating that masks “are NOT effective in preventing the general public from catching #Coronavirus.”
Then, on April 3, Fauci was proclaiming in a PBS NewsHour interview that “universally when people go out and are in a situation when they might come in to closer contact,” such as, he states, when picking up drugs from a pharmacy or buying food, they should “wear that mask.” The same day Adams put out a how-to-make-a-mask video.
Turning on a dime, high level US government medical propagandists were completely reversing their recommendation regarding wearing masks.
The message to take from the switcheroo is not to trust the government medical “experts.” They were misleading people about masks in either March or April, or even both times. Instead of automatically following these radically changing government health claims about masks, consider doing your own research and thinking for yourself. If you follow bad health advice from the government, it is you, not the government, who will suffer the consequences.
The about-face on masks came along with a new CDC recommendation that Americans wear “cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.”
“The CDC can recommend whatever it wants, but I will decide for myself where and when, if ever, I wear a mask,” you may respond. Unfortunately, some businesses, as well as state and local governments have taken the new CDC recommendation and run with it — imposing mandates that all customers in their stores wear masks or all people in a city, county, or state in many circumstances wear masks. Stores like Costco and politicians like Virginia Governor Ralph Northam have used the CDC recommendation as their shift-the-blame basis for imposing mask mandates. Point to the CDC recommendation and mandate away. That is their course of action.
How about the CDC and the US government’s so-called medical experts get out of the “recommendation” business? They are not looking out for our health interests with these recommendations. As is the case with government generally, they tend to be advancing their own interests as well as assisting big money players that have great influence over government policy.
