Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky called mask-wearing a “theater” and a “show” on Thursday during a heated debate with President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser and White House coronavirus grand-master Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, appeared before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee examining the nation’s coronavirus response efforts and got put to work by Senator Paul, who has long been a critic of lockdowns and wearing masks.
The clash began with Paul quoting studies showing that individuals who have been vaccinated, or who were previously infected with COVID-19, are unlikely to be reinfected due to acquired long-term immunity and, thus, are unable to infect others. Paul then asked Fauci about his recent claim that Americans will need to wear masks in 2022.
“You’re telling everybody to wear a mask, whether they’ve had an infection or a vaccine. What I’m saying is they have immunity and everybody agrees they have immunity. What studies do you have that people that have had the vaccine or have had the infection are spreading the infection? If we’re not spreading the infection, isn’t it just theater?” Paul asked.
“It’s not,” Fauci said with a smirk and went into details of the studies that Paul quoted, but couldn’t disprove any of the Paul’s key conclusions. Fauci also insisted that the “wild types” of the virus are “a good reason for a mask,” citing research in South Africa in which some people who had been infected with one type of the virus had no protection against a variant that exists there.
Paul, however, refused to take Fauci’s words at face value and asked for evidence: “What study shows significant reinfection, hospitalization, and death after either natural infection or the vaccine? It doesn’t exist.”
After some further crosstalk, Paul accused Fauci of making policy based on conjecture and engaging in theater. “You’ve been vaccinated and you parade around in two masks for show,” Paul remarked.
The exchange came a little over a week after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a new guidance that graciously allowed people who are fully immunized to safely visit other vaccinated people indoors without wearing a mask or social distancing. At the same time, the CDC also recommended that vaccinated people should still wear masks in public settings, gatherings with unvaccinated people from more than one other household, and with people who are at increased risk for severe illness. Why? If they can’t spread COVID, then it’s only for other people’s comfort, a sheer virtue-signaling, is it not?
Mask-wearing has become a part of good manners, a form of social etiquette, and many on the Left don’t even hide it. “You wouldn’t sneeze into someone’s face or wipe your boogers on an airplane seat. It would be rude. So why wouldn’t you wear a mask?” asks the liberal VICE magazine. But if you’re not sneezing in other people’s faces, it doesn’t hurt anyone to not wear a mask.
How did we go from “please wear a mask when it’s not possible to social distance” to “you can not enter without face covering or mask?” or “not wearing a mask is rude”? Or why, with a swift adoption of mask-wearing with a 90-percent compliance rate, have we still experienced a surge of COVID cases? The CDC itself admitted in a September study that “70% of coronavirus cases ALWAYS wore a mask, while only 3.9% NEVER wore a mask.”
Dr. Fauci and his mask-wearing boss, President Biden, continue to ignore the optimistic signs that we may be much closer to “herd immunity” than we thought, as well as the fact that the whole “masks keep us safe” claim receives no support from the data, which reveal that the states without mask mandates have the same or lower death rates that states that have imposed strict lockdowns and mask mandates.
The masked-up theater of the absurd continues, exposing and — pun intended — unmasking the Democrats’ true intentions, which have nothing to do with public health.
