Remember when Anthony Fauci declared, “There is no reason to be walking around wearing a mask”?

Nearly two years into the ChiCom Virus pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has officially changed its position on the efficacy of cloth masks, essentially admitting what many health experts (and even Fauci before he did a 180) have claimed: They have almost no preventative impact against the coronavirus.

For Democrats, mask mandates are symbolic of their power and control over people. And for their lemmings, masks have become facial virtue signaling. To not be masked was to be viewed as a “science denier” or, worse yet, a dangerous person who doesn’t care about spreading a deadly disease to every passerby. Yet when study after study concluded that masking provided little, if any, discernible impact against the spread of the novel virus, they were quickly dismissed as “misleading” or “unscientific.”

Big Tech got in on the fight against so-called COVID misinformation by putting various warning labels on content and even outright censoring. Just last week, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) had a video pulled and his YouTube account suspended after he dared to truthfully say that cloth masks don’t protect against COVID, which is what the CDC is now admitting. In a video published last August, Paul states: “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work. They don’t prevent infection. … Cloth masks don’t work.”

The CDC’s new masking guidance now reads: “Masks and respirators (i.e., specialized filtering masks such as ‘N95s’) can provide different levels of protection depending on the type of mask and how they are used. Loosely woven cloth products provide the least protection [emphasis added], layered finely woven products offer more protection, well-fitting disposable surgical masks and KN95s offer even more protection, and well-fitting NIOSH-approved respirators (including N95s) offer the highest level of protection.”

In confirming what “the science” has confirmed about masking from the start, the CDC has just substantially widened its trust deficit with those it ostensibly serves.

Once again, this is not new information. Senator Paul was simply following the science available months ago. In fact, this information about masks was well known at the beginning of the pandemic. It likely even played into Fauci’s original dismissive comments on masking. “The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus,” he once said.

Upon the CDC dropping its new masking guidance, Paul asked, “Does this mean snot-nosed censors at YouTube will come to my office and kiss my … and admit I was right?”

So, can the country now be done with this masking theater of the absurd? Or has it become a Linus blanket to tens of millions of Americans?

(Updated)