If it can be said that former President Donald Trump was not sufficiently promoting masks as a tool to stop the pandemic, the opposite is now true: Democrats have taken their obsession with masks to the point of absurdity.
President Joe Biden has been fully vaccinated since January, and yet he continues to wear not one, but two masks in public. In Oregon, a track runner collapsed across the finish line. Her coach suggested that a lack of oxygen caused the fall because the state of Oregon mandates that track athletes wear masks during outdoor competition.
Michigan is now mandating that children between the ages of two and four must wear masks. Hollywood celebrities at the Oscars touted that they were tested, retested, socially distanced, and vaccinated. Yet, during the commercial breaks, they still wore masks while eschewing them for the televised portions of the event.
And then there is Dr. Anthony Fauci, the original opponent of masking who lied at the start of the pandemic that masks were ineffective. Fauci has since become a pro-mask zealot, wearing them even though he has also been vaccinated and suggesting we will all be wearing them well into 2022.
Meanwhile, Fauci and Biden are in no hurry to issue their latest guidance on masking, which is said to be about whether vaccinated people should be wearing masks outdoors. The Biden administration is just getting around to whether the least at-risk people should be wearing masks in the safest possible environment. Even Fauci’s warning of masking in 2022 might be too optimistic.
If Trump was too lax on masking, Biden and his supporters have now swung too far in the opposite direction. They are not treating masks as a tool to stop the pandemic or protect vulnerable populations. They are treating them as a symbol of solidarity and patriotism.
The obsession with masks is clouding their vision of reality. Biden and Fauci predicted the virus would run rampant in Texas after the state lifted its mask mandate. It has now been 47 days, and Texas’s case, death, and hospitalization numbers have continued to drop. Michigan, which is now demanding toddlers wear masks in the park, is still surging.
This mask obsession is not grounded in science or reality. It is nanny-state safetyism, warped into a political tool for Biden to claim he is really treating this virus seriously. With more than 36% of adults fully vaccinated, 53% having received at least one dose, and vaccines being readily available, mask mandates are obsolete. Telling fully vaccinated people to continue to wear masks is pointless safety theater.
