It can’t be repeated enough that whenever a liberal or Democrat says “follow the science,” what they mean is, “Shut up and do as I say.”
Those people will point to whatever the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dictates to justify their demands. But even the CDC doesn’t “follow the science.” Guidance from the CDC and its “experts” is often based on the opposite of “the science.”
To this day, the CDC advises that people can dramatically reduce the risk of infection by frequently washing their hands. The website says that “keeping hands clean is especially important to help prevent the virus from spreading.” And so, since last March, people have been washing and sanitizing their hands until they nearly bleed. Restaurants, stores, and offices offer sanitizer every eight steps in each direction.
Where is “the science” that says washing hands will prevent anyone from catching COVID-19? There isn’t any. The CDC even admits it.
At the start of the pandemic, the theory was that an infected person might contaminate surface areas and that others who touch the same surfaces might then touch the mucus membranes of their own eyes, nose, or mouth. Hence the need for hand-washing.
But since then, the theory has not been borne out. “The risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection via the [contaminated surface] transmission route is low,” the CDC website says, “and generally less than 1 in 10,000, which means that each contact with a contaminated surface has less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of causing an infection.”
Mind you, those extremely low odds of infection apply if you actually touch a surface contaminated with the virus. Furthermore, the CDC says that infection from surface transmission “is difficult to prove definitively.” In other words, we aren’t sure that it takes place at all.
Still, the CDC has specific guidelines for how and when to wash your hands — with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, both before and after every single thing you do. That’s not science. Sure, it doesn’t hurt to wash your hands — please, wash them. It doesn’t hurt to pray for good health while you’re washing. But don’t tell me there is a scientific basis saying that either of these acts prevents me from catching a virus that we now know is easily and perhaps exclusively transmitted through the air.
Moreover, there is no word other than “absurd” to describe the CDC’s unscientific guidance on outdoor activity. We’ve known for months that the risk of transmission in the open air is negligible when individuals maintain at least some distance from one another. New York Times liberal David Leonhardt took notice that the CDC had been estimating that the risk for infection outdoors was “less than 10%,” giving the utterly misleading impression that perhaps nearly one in 10 transmissions might be taking place in the open air. In reality, the risk was closer to 1%, or maybe even lower than 0.1%.
Last month, the CDC said that fully vaccinated individuals can feel comfortable going outdoors without wearing a mask. Why would anyone, regardless of whether they’re vaccinated, have worn a mask outdoors if they knew the risk of infection was below 1%?
CDC guidance currently states that the fully vaccinated “can gather indoors with unvaccinated people of any age from one other household … without masks or staying 6 feet apart.”
But why one household? Why not two or three, or any other number? There’s no scientific basis for these recommendations. The virus isn’t any less infectious by the number of vaccinated households that gather. It only takes one person to infect another, or two others, or 20 others.
This, again, isn’t “The Science.” It is cautious guesswork, and much of it has grown over time into superstition.
You may have already noticed this if you’ve ever been in a conversation with liberals about the biology of sex chromosomes or the point when human life begins. The coronavirus is yet another area where whenever you hear liberals and Democrats say they follow “The Science,” they’re doing the opposite.
