While I’ve never met a Neanderthal, I suspect that our current society probably isn’t one that should be impugning their thinking. For example, whatever Neanderthals’ faults, they surely knew the difference between boys and girls and didn’t entertain fancies such as “Our strength lies in our diversity.” This comes to mind with the controversy over mask-wearing and Joe Biden’s recent claim that easing apparently unnecessary COVID-19 restrictions is “Neanderthal thinking.”
To be precise, Biden went “after Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves and Texas Governor Greg Abbott for lifting their states’ mask mandates and re-opening businesses such as restaurants and retailers at full capacity,” reported the Independent recently. Biden said of the Republican governors that the “last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that, in the meantime, everything’s fine, take off your mask and forget it,” the site also informed.
And Neanderthals certainly do walk among us. After all, taking off your mask and forgetting it is precisely what Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) infamously did at high-end restaurant The French Laundry even when not eating; it’s also what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) did at a hair salon that was by law supposed to have been closed and what Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) was caught doing walking through an airport. This all occurred in the “pandemic’s” midst, mind you.
We can’t know if these unmasked hypocrites “know better,” as Biden coronavirus response team senior advisor Andy Slavitt said last week. But the aforementioned GOP governors, whom Slavitt was referencing, sure seem to.
That’s why they’re dropping the COVID Ritual.
Note that Mississippi — which has relatively large poor and black populations, groups more seriously affected by SARS-CoV-2 — reported zero China virus deaths on Sunday.
Yet all this means is that the Magnolia State is leading a trend. As to this, Slavitt “warned” that “Covid cases have been climbing yet again,” as the Independent put it. This is true. It’s also deceitful.
For “COVID cases have risen by 15 percent in the past two weeks, according to the New York Times,” relates National Review — yet “hospitalizations and deaths have fallen by 5 and 29 percent, respectively.”
This is where the rubber hits the road, too. The positive-case number can be deceptive because it’s influenced by the amount of testing done (test more people, you get more positives) and the tests’ accuracy (there are false positives). What really matter are the hospitalization rate and, in particular, the mortality number.
In fact, having more infections with lower hospitalization and mortality can be beneficial because it can help establish herd immunity.
But what of masks, which have taken on talisman status? Is there really data showing that, when prescribed for the wider population, they reduce China-virus contagion?
It doesn’t seem so. For example, writing Saturday that science shows the “mask zealots were very, very wrong,” American Thinker’s Trevor Thomas first cites the case of Florida. “Note that the cases per 100K in school systems where masks are optional are significantly lower than those systems where masks are mandated,” he writes, providing a graph illustrating his point.
Yet there’s still more. As Town Hall columnist Scott Morefield tweeted recently:
Thomas then sums up, writing that this “is all on top of all of the other science that reveals the truth on the Wuhan virus and masks: the Danish Mask Study; the mask data from ‘all U.S. jurisdictions;’ the mask data from Europe; the data out of Florida; data from the complete NFL season; the data from the Super Bowl; the data from school districts in Texas and Florida that began school last August, have remained open, didn’t cancel events, and never mandated masks; and so on.”
“Lastly, recall that Walmart, Kroger, and the like didn’t mandate masks until July,” he continues. We went months in and out of these stores where no masks were required, the virus was supposedly raging, and yet hospitals sat nearly empty.”
So it appears that masks aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. What’s more, an ex-healthcare professional theorized last year that masks may actually be contributing to the virus’s spread. How?
By becoming like Petri dishes on people’s faces. Heck, maybe this is why some top Democrats don’t seem to want to wear them (except for photo ops).
Whatever the case, it has now been shown definitively — over and over again — that what’s certainly a cure worse than the disease are lockdowns themselves. They don’t save lives; they kill.
Politicians supporting them aren’t acting in Americans’ best interests, but against them. And as they go maskless and flout their own COVID regulations, they’re endangering lives. This isn’t, however, because they’re transmitting a virus but because they’re spreading something far more dangerous: lies.
