Miranda Devine: Mask or no mask — who knows?
President Joe Biden is at odds with the advice from his own scientists as he continues to wear a face mask in situations he need not. Time for him to show the masses the real course.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Everyone is laughing about the weird perspective in the photo of the Bidens visiting the Carters in Georgia last week.
The most significant thing about the image was that neither the president nor Jill Biden was wearing a mask around 96-year-old Jimmy Carter and 93-year-old Rosalynn, who also were sans mask.
And good for them. They were all acting perfectly in accordance with CDC guidance allowing vaccinated people to have small indoor gatherings without masks.
So why on earth did the Bidens put their masks back on the minute they walked outside?
From a political party that professes to “follow the science,” it is a confusing message that erodes trust in public-health experts.
While his mouth might say the opposite, the president’s mask tells us he doesn’t believe the vaccine works.
Biden, or at least those around him, are perfectly aware that the message he sends by clinging to his mask is at odds with the current science of COVID-19 and the need to encourage stragglers to get vaccinated.
Vaccinated since December, Biden was mocked around the world when he wore his mask during a virtual climate summit last month.
Almost every other leader — from Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Germany’s Angela Merkel to Canada’s Justin Trudeau and the European Commission’s Ursula von der Leyen — was boldly barefaced on screen.
There’s nothing wrong with members of the public wearing double masks the rest of their lives if that’s what they want.
But the US president should not be modelling fear, especially at a time when vaccine hesitancy threatens to delay herd immunity.
We’re not getting leadership from Biden’s COVID tsar, Dr Anthony Fauci, either. Although 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 just as timid.
He was on CNN on Wednesday defending the CDC’s absurd guidelines for summer camps, which require vaccinated adults and kids over the age of two to be masked at all times, even outdoors. The rules are at odds with the CDC’s own advice that there is minimal risk of transmission outdoors and that children are at low risk of illness or spread.
“I wouldn’t call [the guidelines excessive] but they certainly are conservative,” Fauci chortled.
“The CDC makes decisions based on science.”
That would be reassuring if we could believe it. But after revelation this week that some of the CDC guidelines on schools reopening were dictated by teacher unions, you have to wonder.
The American Federation of Teachers shamelessly described the CDC as its “thought partner.” How humiliating for the CDC, a once-respected institution paid a whopping $8 billion last year to dispense impartial health guidance.
Allowing vested interests to dictate public-health policy is the exact definition of politicising science.
But Biden is not alone among progressives who have turned away from their professed faith in “the science”.
An illuminating article in The Atlantic this week, headlined “The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown,” describes progressives who refuse to give up masks and other pandemic restrictions in defiance of scientific evidence and data.
Their “diligence against COVID-19 remains an expression of political identity — even when that means over-estimating the disease’s risks or setting limits far more strict than what public-health guidelines permit.”
For many progressives, “extreme vigilance was in part about opposing Donald Trump”. If Trump said, “Keep schools open,” then they would do everything they could to keep schools closed.
That’s not science, either.
The attitude of pious leftists who have turned mask-wearing into a morality test is neatly encapsulated in a comment overheard in Washington DC: “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.”
This is Biden’s message and, politically, it makes sense.
He can’t admit that the vaccine rollout was well under way at a rate of 1.6 million shots in arms the day he took office, or he won’t be able to pretend it’s his triumph.
He can’t admit that the economy was storming back in a nice V shape before he did a thing, or he won’t be able to justify the $6 trillion in crisis spending his party is ramming through Congress.
So Biden needs Americans to remain masked and fearful just long enough for him to claim credit for the end of the pandemic and the strength of the economy.
He once suggested that Independence Day would be our date with freedom, but this week, he pushed it back to Labor Day.
He offered no science to justify the delay.
Enough. The introverts and opportunists have had their day — or rather, 14 months — and now it’s time for the rest of us to come out of the closet, vaccination papers in hand and actual science to back us up.
Police officers, grocery clerks, construction workers, bus drivers, medical professionals, Amazon sortation associates, waiters, priests, private-school teachers, drug dealers and homeless people, all have been braving human contact for months, so it’s time for the rest of us to ditch the PJs and get back to the land of the living — or else what is the point of this great metropolis?
FEDS DO GIULIANI INJUSTICE
IT’S difficult to understand why federal prosecutors are treating former Mayor Rudy Giuliani as a villain, to the extent of raiding his apartment at dawn and spying on his iCloud account with a covert warrant.
History shows that former President Donald Trump’s former lawyer has been begging to co-operate with investigations. He had information about the Biden family’s operations in Ukraine that he was eager to share, when Trump was being impeached for the first time.
In November 2019, the month before the impeachment, media leaks about an investigation by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York were damaging Giuliani. He said he wanted to confront any allegations head on.
But the office rebuffed his offer to be interviewed, so his lawyer, Robert Costello, asked a well-connected former official at the Department of Justice for advice.
“We were faced with Hobson’s choice,” says Costello. “We couldn’t go to the [New York US attorney] so we thought about going to [US Attorney John] Durham in the District of Connecticut.”
They decided against contacting Durham, the special counsel investigating the origins of the Russia-collusion hoax, because they thought it would further antagonise the New York US attorney.
But Costello’s contact came through, and he soon received a call from the US attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
“He told me that [the Department of Justice] had directed him to call me and set up a meeting with myself and Mayor Giuliani to receive the evidence we had about the Ukraine.”
Giuliani and Costello flew to Pittsburgh on Jan. 29, 2020, at their own expense and were met by FBI agents in black Chevy Suburbans and driven to FBI headquarters.
There, they met for three hours with the US attorney, the chief assistant US attorney, the chief of the criminal division, two other attorneys, the special agent in charge of the Pittsburgh FBI office, his deputy and three other FBI special agents, according to Costello.
Giuliani provided documents and a list of witnesses to back his tales of skulduggery involving Joe Biden, the firing of Ukraine’s chief prosecutor and Hunter Biden’s $83,000-a-month gig on the board of the corrupt Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. Giuliani’s information has been validated since, and yet the New York US attorney is treating him like an uncooperative witness. That’s not the way justice is supposed to work.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph
More Coverage
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.
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.