President Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office are almost up, which means his federal mask mandate should be too.
When Biden signed an executive order requiring masks on all federal property, indoors and outdoors, he promised it wouldn’t last long. “Just 100 days to mask, not forever,” he said. “One hundred days.” Now that timeline is up, and Biden must decide whether to shift the goalposts again, as health officials have been doing for more than a year, or keep his word and repeal the mandate.
It sounds like he’s leaning toward the latter. Biden is expected to lift the outdoor mask mandate for vaccinated people this week while keeping the rule in place indoors, according to CNN. Apparently, the White House has realized it should actually listen to the science, which proves outdoor transmission of COVID-19 is extremely rare, even among unvaccinated adults.
However, Biden ought to go one step further and encourage fully vaccinated adults to take off their masks for good, outdoors and indoors. Several studies show that the vaccines not only protect people from contracting the coronavirus but they also prevent them from spreading the virus to others. One study conducted in Israel found that 12 days after receiving the Pfizer vaccine, vaccinated adults saw their average viral loads decrease fourfold, meaning the vaccine made them less infectious.
Several public health experts in the United States have said their own research agrees with Israel’s study. Two epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins, Kate Grabowski and Justin Lessler, argued recently that they are “confident” the coronavirus vaccines reduce transmission of the virus. Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, agreed and said the vaccines could reduce transmission by more than 50%.
In other words, there is no reason for vaccinated adults to continue wearing masks and keeping their distance from others when there is a very small chance they might spread COVID-19 and an even smaller chance that they would contract the virus in the first place.
Public messaging needs to reflect this data, starting with Biden’s updated mask guidance. The government needs to stop feeding into the coronavirus hysteria, which has become so insane that anyone who dares to cite the studies I mentioned above is told they have blood on their hands, and start pushing people back toward normality. At this point, that’s the only approach that follows the science.
