Following the Science? Blue States reject the CDC’s mask guidance

Following the Science? Blue States reject the CDC’s mask guidance

National Review

The CDC finally announced last week that, with few exceptions, anyone who is fully vaccinated can participate in indoor and outdoor activities, large or small, without wearing a mask or physical distancing: “If you are fully vaccinated, you are protected, and you can start doing the things that you stopped doing because of the pandemic,” the agency’s director said.

The CDC’s announcement comes as cases in nearly every state continue to plummet and vaccination rates rise. But those trends aren’t new; they were obvious last week, when CDC director Rochelle Walensky gave an emotional TV interview in which she said she would keep her vaccinated teenagers home from summer camp because they cannot be made safe. Days after that interview, Walensky, smiling from ear to ear, gave a triumphant press conference releasing vaccinated Americans from mask-wearing.

However, the good news was rejected in a slew of Democrat-led locales including New Jersey, Hawaii, and Washington, D.C., which have all kept indoor mask mandates in place for those vaccinated for the time being.

New Jersey governor Phil Murphy (D) announced one day after the CDC issued its guidance that the Garden State would not drop its mask mandate, saying “to be clear, we’re making incredible progress, but we’re not there yet,” though he noted the state is in the top ten in vaccinations and the top five in lowest case counts.

Meanwhile, half of the country’s governors, a majority of whom are Republicans, had already partially or completely lifted mask mandates — even New York governor Andrew Cuomo acquiesced, announcing Monday that his state would adopt the CDC’s framework.

Murphy, however, defended his decision: “Dr. Fauci himself said yesterday that he thinks lifting indoor mask mandates at this time could lead to a rise in infections. So we’re not going to let up for the next few weeks as we keep pushing forward on our statewide vaccination goals.”

Yet even Fauci has called to “liberalize the restrictions so people can feel like they’re getting back to some normalcy.” He said, “Pulling back restrictions on indoor masks is an important step in the right direction.”

“You can’t inhibit people from doing the things they want to do, which is one of the reasons they wanted to get vaccinated in the first place, because other people are not getting vaccinated,” Fauci added.

However, Fauci still rained on many Americans’ parades in announcing that children too young to be vaccinated will still have to wear masks when they are indoors and around others “even if older kids and adults are free to take off face protection one they are fully vaccinated,” including in the fall when the school year begins and they’re “out there playing with their friends” and “particularly in an indoor situation.”

Fauci said children younger than twelve will likely not be vaccinated until the end of the calendar year.

In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced face masks would no longer be required in secondary school classrooms in England beginning this week. The country’s Department for Education said “the latest data shows infection rates continuing to decrease” and not having to wear masks would “improve interaction between teachers and students”.

A representative from Public Health England, said: “It’s important to strike a balance between Covid-19 protection and student well-being” and that “scientific studies show that Covid-19 transmission in schools remains low”.

In the U.S., the president of the all-powerful American Federation of Teachers — a teachers’ union that has fought for much of the last year to keep classrooms closed despite scientific studies showing little-to-no transmission of the virus occurs in schools — said in a tweet that she believes it is a “good idea to keep vigilant right now on distancing and masks in schools and spend a few minutes trying to figure out how the new @cdc mask guidance affects schools.”

Fauci’s Folly

While following the science, for many, has largely meant following Fauci, a biosafety expert told National Review this week that Fauci made a “demonstrably false” claim during his testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee last week.

Dr. Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, took issue with Fauci’s claim — made during an exchange with Senator Rand Paul — that “the NIH [National Institutes of Health] has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV].”

At least some of the NIH-funded research conducted at the WIV “unequivocally” qualifies as gain-of-function, Ebright said.

Watch: Charles C.W. Cooke on Morning Joe

Remember Rebekah Jones? Last week, NR’s Charlie Cooke published a deep-dive debunking Jones’s claim that she was ordered to cook the state’s COVID books in order to vindicate the DeSantis administration’s approach. Citing public records, Charlie lays out Jones’s long history of dishonesty and how she didn’t even have access to raw COVID data, which she presumably would have needed if her superiors wanted her to alter it. This morning, Charlie went on Morning Joe to discuss the story further.

Headline Fail of the Week

In a video segment titled “MEET THE RIOT SQUAD: RIGHT-WING REPORTERS WHOSE VIRAL VIDEOS ARE USED TO SMEAR BLM,” The Intercept tries and fails to smear a crew of conservative and independent journalists who had the temerity to actually cover the riots that caused an estimated $1-2 billion in property damage within a few weeks early last summer. The video was so poorly conceived and so badly executed that it caused Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald to question his life choices.

“It disgusts me that I played a role in bringing this s*** organization into the world,” Greenwald wrote.

Not only did The Intercept double down in the face of criticism, saying it was “proud” of the video and accompanying article, it also defended one of the most bizarre claims made in the piece — that Daily Caller video journalist Richie McGinniss, who tried to save the life of one of those shot by Kyle Rittenhouse, “might have decided to suppress or delete footage that could be used to convict the young right-wing vigilante.” The Intercept tried to back up the bizarre allegation, which McGinniss has denied, by linking to a random Twitter account speculating about the night’s events.

Andrew Cuomo’s Comfortability with Making People Uncomfortable

And finally, disgraced New York Governor Andrew Cuomo attempted to redefine what harassment is this week when he said “If I just made you feel uncomfortable, that is not harassment. That’s you feeling uncomfortable.”

This is the same Andrew Cuomo who signed a law in 2019 lowering the evidentiary standard for criminal sexual harassment in the workplace. Under New York law, the alleged perpetrator’s intent is irrelevant — but apparently intent still matters when Cuomo himself is in the dock.

This news originally appeared in National Review.

 

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