White House COVID-19 adviser Dr. Scott Atlas criticized the “obsession” with mask mandates, going against the advice of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and other advisers, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“The mask mandates have been proven not to work,” Atlas said during an interview on Fox News last week. “You look at Europe … these countries have had mask mandates for months, and they’re exploding with cases.”
President Trump cited Atlas while casting doubt on how effective masks are at stopping the spread of coronavirus during his town hall Thursday. Moderator Savannah Guthrie fired back that Atlas isn’t an infectious disease expert.
“There’s a lot of things I’m not,” Atlas said when presented with the clip of Guthrie. “But one thing I can do is read the literature and understand that the evidence on universal masking is really pretty weak.”
“In fact, the World Health Organization does not recommend universal masking. Professor Heneghan, who is from Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, says ‘after 20 years of pandemics, two decades, we’re still not sure about universal masking.’”
The WHO advises the wearing of masks to reduce transmission of coronavirus, as of this summer.
Atlas went on to say that the CDC also has put forth conflicting research.
“The CDC study that the president was quoting showed that 70% of people who got the virus had worn masks all the time, over 80% almost all the time,” Atlas said, referring to a September CDC study.
“It’s sort of a lame, bizarre obsession at this point, to claim that everyone must have universal masking,” Atlas said. “Cases explode through it. We have states; we have L.A. County, we have Miami-Dade County, we have Hawaii … Philippines, Spain, France, U.K. Mask mandates don’t work.”
“The president has a rational, common sense, mask policy,” he continued.”If you cannot socially distance, you wear a mask, particularly when you’re high risk.”
“I think Americans are getting a little bit sick of this obsession with masks,” Atlas said.
“It’s sort of a lame, bizarre obsession at this point to claim that everyone must have universal masking…mask mandates don’t work”
Obsession is exactly the right word. pic.twitter.com/8DqhRwl3rs
— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) October 16, 2020
Trump has said Atlas brings “great ideas” to the coronavirus task force, despite his advice often contradicting the CDC and other government medical experts.
“He’s working with us and will be working with us on the coronavirus,” Trump said of Atlas in August. “And he has many great ideas. And he thinks what we’ve done is really good, and now we’ll take it to a new level.”
The CDC recommends the use of masks “in public settings and when around people who don’t live in your household, especially when other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain.”
The CDC says that masks “may help prevent people who have COVID-19 from spreading the virus to others” and that “masks are most likely to reduce the spread of COVID-19 when they are widely used by people in public settings.”
Fauci, the government’s top disease expert, says the data on masks working is clear.
“I think the — the data speak for themselves,” Fauci said of mask-wearing. “We had a super-spreader event in the White House, and it was in a situation where people were crowded together and were not wearing masks. So the data speak for themselves.”
