Unless you’re properly wearing a fresh N95 mask, you’re wasting your time with “face decorations.” So says even CNN’s leftist “expert,” who’s finally come around to what conservatives have argued for well over a year. This inconvenient science is only part of what makes mask mandates so objectionable.

Political analyst Kylee Zempel has more:

We’ve been censored. Hollered at by Karens in the grocery store and sometimes even outdoors. We’ve been lectured, demonized, scoffed at, and called murderers and rubes — all for the sin of ignoring mask security theater and daring to show the lower half of our faces in public.

That’s why it’s just remarkable to hear the experts now admit that the same face coverings required in so many establishments and localities are not stopping any virus from spreading.

CNN medical analyst Leana Wen, who was previously president of abortion giant Planned Parenthood, said so on the network — and not only in reference to the current variant, as if new data has suddenly justified a change in guidance. She explicitly said cloth masks haven’t been effective since the dawn of the Wuhan virus.

“Cloth masks are not appropriate for this pandemic. It’s not appropriate for omicron, it was not appropriate for delta, alpha, or any of the previous variants either, because we’re dealing with something that’s airborne,” Wen said.

“Don’t wear a cloth mask,” she said in another segment, going so far as to call them little more than “facial decorations.”

“It isn’t just one floating head on CNN.” Zempel says. She noted that the Capitol Hill attending physician has ordered only “the more protective KN95 or N95 masks.”

She also points to the CDC, which says, a surgical mask “is not considered respiratory protection.”

This is now the wisdom imparted by the experts, that the sweaty, flimsy, itchy muzzles that have been forced on schoolchildren, healthy athletes, socially distant employees, grocery-shopping moms, and even their toddlers are “not appropriate.” They’re nothing more than “facial decorations” against a virus that’s in the air and can’t be contained.

It’s almost like conservatives have been reading the available scientific studies and saying this since the beginning.

When saying such things, conservatives — or even nonpartisan experts — faced scorn and censorship.

Yet now, the left’s “experts” are going on network television to announce that we must stop wearing the cloth and surgical masks that have become synonymous with COVID morality, and they’re announcing that actually we’ve known these masks have been “inappropriate” all along.

Americans are just supposed to take this. In response to the gaslighting, they’re just supposed to obediently discard the cloth masks they’ve been berated and coerced into wearing and instead go buy some stronger mask to protect God-knows-who from this wave of a virus that manifests as the common cold for even the vast majority of the yet-unvaccinated.

Mandates still abound in some places, and may for a long time. Zempel concludes:

The gaslighting is enough to drive anyone absolutely mad, but with the experts’ admission that most of our masks aren’t cutting it, they’ve also admitted something far more consequential. These masks and the mandates that accompany them have never been about controlling a virus. They’ve always been about controlling people.

Read the whole thing here.