If you’re an advisor to President Joe Biden, you can say that most face masks do nothing to stop the spread of the China Virus.
If you’re GOP Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, you can’t.
Thus, when the New York Times and other media reported that YouTube had suspended Paul’s account after he shared a video in which he asserts it, they didn’t mention Michael Osterholm, director for Infectious Disease, Research, and Policy at the University of Minnesota. He says the same thing.
Leftist contrarian Glenn Greenwald dug up Osterholm’s remarks on CNN from less than two weeks ago to point out the double standard.
Leftists cheer when Big Tech locks down free speech.
The Video
The video is not the one that Paul shared and invited the wrath of radical Representative Rashida Tlaib, the hysteric from Michigan.
Instead, Paul spoke with Newsmax and said cloth and disposable masks don’t stop transmission of the deadly Asiatic pathogen. He observed that Anthony Fauci admitted that fact privately, but said the opposite publicly. Fauci wanted to protect the supply of N95 masks that actually do prevent transmission.
Quoting Fauci’s private beliefs, Paul said that “most of the masks you can get over the counter don’t work because the virus particles are too small and go right through them. That’s still true. They don’t work. There’s no value. And yet we’re mandating them by law.”
Thus, Fauci is “promulgating bad science” and “pseudoscience.”
Paul said school kids needn’t wear masks outside, particularly if they are participating in sports, because doing so is unhealthful, and “there’s no science to say you’re preventing disease.”
“It’s a disservice to the public,” he said. Fauci admitted that he lied, Paul said, but “it was a lie for our own good.”
And so yesterday, YouTube suspended Paul’s account for a week. He can’t post new videos. But the move by the social-media site’s “left-wing cretins” is a “badge of honor,” Paul tweeted.
Greenwald, Osterholm
Bad as that move looks, it looks even worse given that Biden’s own science advisor — again, Osterholm — said what Paul said on August 2 to CNN talker Christine Amanpour.
“I think we’ve all done a disservice to the public,” Osterholm said. “When you actually look at face cloth coverings, those cloth pieces that hang over your face, they actually only have very limited impact in reducing the amount of virus that you inhale in or exhale out.”
The science, in other words, shows that masks don’t work.
And in fact, in studies that have been done show that if an individual might get infected within 15 minutes in a room, by time and concentration of the virus in the room, if you add a face cloth covering, you only get about five more minutes of protection.
And so, I’ve been really, unfortunately, really disappointed with my colleagues in public health for not being more clear about what can masking do or not do.
Although N95 masks do stop transmission of the virus, Osterholm said, “telling people that, in fact, just putting a face cloth covering on is going to protect you is just simply not true.”
He said much the same thing to CNN’s John King before that, Greenwald noted.
Leftists have become statist authoritarians in cheering YouTube’s censoring of Paul, and Big Tech is acting at the behest of government, Greenwald averred, which means censorship isn’t strictly a corporate decision.
“Just look at the number of liberals cheering and justifying YouTube’s suspension of Rand Paul for his comments on masks — ones echoed by Biden’s own former COVID adviser — and you’ll see why this faction is completely authoritarian,” he tweeted. “They crave corporate speech policing.”
“There’s one key point overlooked in discussions of Big Tech censorship,” he continued:
Even if you want to reject the view adopted by the House Antitrust Committee that these are monopolies, their censorship is *not* purely “private company” decisions. They’re coerced by Dems to censor.
Over the last year, Congressional Dems — at least 3 times — have summoned the CEOs of Google, Facebook and Twitter and *explicitly threatened that they’d be punished with laws and regulations if they don’t censor more. That makes it quasi-state action.
