OP-ED: The wonderfully weird world of wearing masks and feeling safe
Healthcare bureaucrats such as Dr. Robert Redfield, the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have demonstrated their unique contempt for the intelligence and health of the American people since February. His recent comments about masks being potentially more effective than a vaccine leave one scratching his head.
Recently, Redfield testified about masks in the Senate, stating: "They are our best defense. I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me than the vaccine because the immunogenicity might only be 70%, and if I don't get an immune response, the vaccine is not going to protect me. This mask will."
That's interesting because CDC guidelines have proven to be very different from Redfield's reliance on masks.
At the end of July, the CDC noted that masks had little effect on stopping spread when in close proximity for an extended period of time. (Close proximity is being within 6 feet according to the CDC. An extended period of time is more than 15 minutes.) What that means is that wearing a mask while sitting next to someone for 16 minutes, three hours, or three days, will provide almost no protection to either of those sitting next to each other.
More perplexing is the magical time frame of 15 minutes. Apparently, sitting next to someone for 14 minutes, even without a mask, will put the parties in close proximity to each other at negligible risk.
Perhaps that is why when I reported that I might have been exposed to COVID at a meeting, but that the person who had tested positive for COVID had worn a mask and been about 30 feet away from me, my doctor told me that he didn't care about the masks. "Masks aren't important," he said.
Wonderfully weird is that I need to wear a mask when checking in at a restaurant, and while they escort me to my table, but I can take the mask off as soon as I am seated.
What's good for the goose is not good for the gander, as Dr. Anthony Fauci has shown us. When he was sitting at a baseball game after throwing out the first pitch for the MLB season, he didn't need to wear his mask. In a similar situation, a mom attending her son's football game in Ohio was tased for not wearing a mask nor immediately complying when police attempted to put handcuffs on her … for not wearing a mask.
This indicates that you are too special to be bound by your own policies if you are an important medical bureaucrat. But if you are an important mom, a citizen of this great country, you are subject to being treated like a criminal for daring to be maskless in public.
The Ohio mom should have carried a protest sign and a Molotov cocktail. She likely would have been ignored by the police on the instructions of the local elected officials.
Back to Redfield. It will be a welcome day when he, Fauci, and Dr. Deborah Birx leave the scene of American public health. The three have had a propensity for attracting public attention and undermining the administration while ignoring science.
Redfield's latest moment of intemperance was to blast imminent Stanford neurosurgeon, and member of the coronavirus task force, Dr. Scott Atlas. Redfield recently claimed that "everything [Atlas] says is false." Projection?
Atlas simply responded by referring to the numerous scientific studies and reams of data that support his position and that have the inconvenient, at least for Redfield, aspect of demonstrating Redfield's many mistakes.
How about the whopper that anyone could die of COVID. In actuality, 94% of the reported deaths were of people who had, on average, more than 2.5 preexisting medical conditions and were advanced in age. In other words, the one thing Dr. Birx got right was when she told the world months ago that we were overstating the fatality rate of COVID cases by at least 25% — turns out way more than 25%.
Dr. Redfield and this trio of public health bureaucrats have contempt for the public, our ideals, and finally, for medical and science professionals who follow the science and data. They have enjoyed power too much. It would do the nation good to thank them, wish them well, and bid adieu to these three.