The Patriot Post® · Unmasking the CDC's Political Science
Last week, we got wind that the CDC (a.k.a. the Centers for Destroyed Credibility) was going to grease the skids for Joe Biden’s big COVID pivot in his upcoming State of the Union Address. Lo and behold, just ahead of that speech Tuesday, the CDC is set to announce big changes to its recommendations on masks. Most Americans, it now says, no longer need them.
We previously noted the problem with the CDC’s methodology — it relies on 2020 metrics of a very low threshold of cases per 100,000. Virtually the entire nation still meets that measure, though it isn’t the best one for making this decision. As it turns out, the CDC now agrees.
The CDC is making “a change to the metrics it uses to determine whether to recommend face coverings, shifting from looking at COVID-19 case counts to a more holistic view of risk from the coronavirus to a community,” reports the Associated Press. That will include factors like hospital capacity and current admissions.
“Under current guidelines, masks are recommended for people residing in communities of substantial or high transmission — roughly 95% of U.S. counties, according to the latest data.” But here’s the great news: “Under the new guidelines, the vast majority of Americans will no longer live in areas where indoor masking in public is recommended, based on current data.”
We’ve been questioning the effectiveness of the most common masks against viral spread since Dr. Anthony Fauci changed his mind and started recommending them in the spring of 2020. “The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material,” Fauci wrote to a colleague on February 4, 2020. “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” Fauci said on March 8, 2020. Indeed, Fauci and virtually every other expert didn’t recommend using masks until the spring of 2020, when masking suddenly became, to put it as charitably as possible, the primary way people could show they cared about others. Less charitably, some might call it an empty virtue signal.
On April 3, 2020, the CDC recommended that people wear cloth or surgical masks. Earlier this year, the CDC admitted that cloth masks are and always have been ineffective. Now it’s saying we’re far enough along to avoid any kind of mask in most cases.
Welcome back to the science, CDC.
The political science is what brought about this “change” to the medical science. Biden and the Democrats desperately need a way out of the pandemic before this fall’s elections because they need to stop another “virus” — Republicans defeating Democrats.
Not that they’ll ever admit such a thing. According to the AP, “The CDC’s director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, has said a change has been in the works.” Of course it has. Biden’s SOTU has been on the calendar for some time now.
Two caveats: Don’t expect the CDC to loosen up on masking the least vulnerable among us — children. Never mind speech impediments or reading handicaps. We have to keep the children safe teachers unions happy.
And Walensky already said this might not be permanent. “We want to give people a break from things like mask-wearing when these metrics are better,” she said recently, “and then have the ability to reach for them again should things worsen” [emphasis added].
Is it any wonder no one trusts the government?
Update 2/28: “More than 70% of Americans should be able to remove their masks indoors, including inside schools, under new metrics outlined Friday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that represent a seismic shift in how the public health agency plans to measure COVID-19 risk,” reports ABC News. “Under the new metrics, more than half of U.S. counties, which make up about three-fourths of where Americans live, are now considered to be at ‘low’ or ‘medium’ risk because of a reduced number of new COVID-19 hospitalizations and adequate hospital space. Accordingly, the CDC would no longer recommend that these communities insist on indoor masking.”