Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN last weekend that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to release new guidance suggesting relaxed outdoor mask policies.
“The risk when you’re outdoors – which we have been saying all along – is extremely low,” Fauci, who is notorious for flip-flopping on COVID-19 guidance, said. “And if you are vaccinated, it’s even lower. So you’re going to be hearing about those kinds of recommendations soon.”
If memory serves, Scott Atlas was saying this the loudest, and he was run out of Dodge. https://t.co/SnbP7PgmaN
— Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) April 26, 2021
While Fauci spent most of the last year drumming up media coverage, TV hits, and other opportunities to stay in the limelight, another health care policy adviser who sat on former President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force for more than 100 days warned that Fauci, the CDC, and others participating the scientific “groupthink” surrounding COVID-19 could be approaching the virus wrong.
Dr. Scott Atlas was one of the first and only voices in the COVID fight who pushed back on masking outdoors and questioned the dominant narrative that conquering the virus required a fear-filled approach.
“Why in the world would you wear a mask if you’re riding your bicycle all alone outside? Why in the world would you wear a mask if you’re in your own car driving? Why in the world would you wear a mask if you’re in the desert all alone?” Atlas told Real Clear Politics in October.
He made his argument about masking at length when we last spoke in October https://t.co/qjfhoZoCp5
— Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) April 26, 2021
The mouthpieces at the CDC, however, were clearly opposed to Atlas’s thinking. During the 2020 lockdowns and reopening controversies, former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield said that “everything [Atlas] says is false.”
Fauci also hinted that while most of the COVID task force seemed to be on the same page, there was an obvious “outlier.” The people lobbing these criticisms, Atlas said, are motivated by the attention they are granted by the media and are “simply used to groupthink and not to informed people who have a critical thought process.”
“The CDC has many fine scientists, I am sure of that, but when the head of the CDC held up a mask and said a mask is better than a vaccine, that is absurd. That is not science. That is contrary to all rational thought,” Atlas noted.
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