Miranda Devine: Joe Biden leads mask fear campaign despite science guidelines
Health officials say it’s safe to stop wearing COVID masks, so why are so many Americans — from the President down — clinging to them like safety blankets, asks Miranda Devine.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Three-quarters of pedestrians on a sunny 9th Ave in Hell’s Kitchen during a recent lunchtime still were wearing masks. This was despite new guidelines from the US Centres for Disease Control eliminating the need for face coverings for vaccinated people.
Of 100 people in a five-block stretch, only 23 were sans mask.
Yet 44 per cent of adults in Manhattan have been fully vaccinated and 62 per cent have had one shot, according to the CDC.
So why are so many New Yorkers still wedded to the mask culture?
Are they all neurotic introverts? Maybe they think they’re setting a good example or just have not heard about the new CDC rules.
Or maybe they’ve fallen for the ruse that it doesn’t matter if you’ve been vaccinated, you still need to wear two masks — or three! — even on a zoom call.
US President Joe Biden was mocked last month when he was virtually the only world leader wearing a mask during a virtual climate summit. Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Germany’s Angela Merkel, Turkey’s Recep Erdogan Canada’s Justin Trudeau, EU leader Ursula von der Leyen and Australia’s own Scott Morrison were all boldly barefaced in their little boxes on screen.
But Biden, who was vaccinated last December, before he even took office, clings to his mask like a security blanket.
The message that sends is terrible in a country where vaccination rates are slowing down.
On the day last week that he announced the loosened CDC mask guidelines, Biden walked out of the White House down a ramp, along a path and across the North Lawn to a podium — wearing his big black mask the whole way.
One reporter had the presence of mind to ask what kind of message he thought he was sending by wearing his mask to the podium.
“By watching me take it off and not put it back on until I get inside,” Biden replied, whatever that meant. But the optics are unmistakeable.
Biden’s CDC director Dr Rochelle Walensky has been crystal clear about the science: “There are many situations where fully vaccinated people do not have to wear masks, particularly if they are outdoors”.
But with his actions, the President is giving the opposite message, and undermining the vaccination imperative.
He wears face coverings everywhere and flies into a panic when he forgets where he put his mask, which he often does after delivering a teleprompter speech.
Sometimes he finds it in his pocket, or maybe inside his ring binder, but his rummaging around for his mask has become a standing joke. His staff now carry spares for him.
After being criticised for wearing a mask to his State of the Union speech last week in a half-empty room of fully vaccinated, socially distanced people who also were needlessly masked in defiance of CDC guidelines, Biden doubled down on Sunday when asked why he won’t give up his face coverings.
Wearing a mask is a “patriotic responsibility”, the President said.
Well, then his administration shouldn’t be surprised when people decide not to bother getting vaccinated, because where is the incentive if nothing changes?
The fact is, Biden and his coronavirus tsar, Dr Anthony “Flip Flop” Fauci are ruining the vaccine legacy that Donald Trump left them.
Though fully vaccinated, Fauci says he still won’t eat indoors, go to a movie theatre or get on a plane, and he wants the rest of America to be as timid as he is.
There were already 1.6 million shots going in arms every day by the time Biden was sworn in and all that was left to do was accelerate the rollout, but vaccine hesitancy may delay herd immunity.
Unfortunately, vaccination, along with masks, has become the latest victim of the US culture wars.
“I guess I’m vaccinated so I don’t have to wear a mask outside but … I really don’t want people to think I’m a Republican,” was a comment overheard in Washington, DC, which neatly sums up the attitude of pious leftists who have turned mask-wearing into a morality test, no matter what the “science” says.
Meanwhile, Christian rubes and white Republicans are being demonised for supposedly refusing to get vaccinated.
“It’s time to start shunning the ‘vaccine hesitant’,” wrote a USA Today columnist, pointing the finger at “half-witted … evangelicals and Republicans”.
The attacks are based on old polls, which are notoriously unreliable when it comes to capturing Republicans’ opinions.
But if you look at the demographic data of who actually has been vaccinated, you can see that it’s more likely that Democrats are hesitant to get the shots.
For example, Democrats make up 76 per cent of voters in the District of Columbia, and yet just 26.8 per cent of DC had been fully vaccinated by Saturday.
South Dakota, a den of white Republicans, by contrast had 35.8 per cent of its population fully vaccinated, even though rural people are arguably not at as great a risk as those in dense cities.
Falsely blaming Republicans is not going to get more shots into arms.
What would help is if Biden and Fauci and other high-profile Democrats who have been vaccinated would simply follow CDC advice and dispense with masks when they’re unnecessary.
That would give people hope that the nightmare is coming to an end.
At this point, 38 to 45 per cent of Americans have natural antibodies after catching COVID-19 and recovering, anyway with only a 0.6 per cent risk of reinfection, says Dr Marty Makary, the science-driven Johns Hopkins professor of Public Health.
“We have a completely distorted perception of risk,” he told Fox News last week.
“We’re doing better than a mild flu season in terms of daily cases and hospitalisation … more people have tuberculosis than coronavirus right now.”
As well, 54 per cent of adults have had at least one vaccine shot, which means that about three-quarters of adult Americans have at least partial immunity, he says.
It’s a pity Makary wasn’t the public face of the pandemic instead of Fauci.
At least he holds out the prospect of Americans resuming a normal life by September, which, after all, is the incentive to get vaccinated.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph
More Coverage
Join the conversation
Albanese’s ‘great’ call with Trump turned out to be a dud, so why can’t Dutton capitalise?
The Prime Minister’s failure to get an Australian exemption from American steel and aluminium tariffs is emblematic of his all talk, no action style, writes James Morrow.
Read more
What Albo needs to do to dodge Trump’s tariffs
Anthony Albanese’s pitch to avoid Donald Trump’s tariffs is simple: we are not ripping anyone off. The President appears to have listened, but the PM has not convinced him yet.
Read more