A newly elected conservative House member who has taken the lead in fighting a congressional mask mandate today seized on a new Danish study that found that masks don’t make a difference in stopping the spread of the coronavirus.
“Paging Dr. Fauci,” tweeted Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene.
In commenting to Secrets on Wednesday, she said, “America is about freedom. That should include the freedom to wear a mask or not. I want to protect those that are in the risk group. We can be responsible without ruining lives. Healthy adults and children are virtually unaffected by this virus.”
And she added, “Will Dr. Fauci trust the science on this one? I will always call face coverings what they are: oppressive. Just ask any woman in Iran.”
In an interview with Secrets during last week’s new member orientation, she blasted a House rule stating that members, staff, and visitors seen without wearing a mask will be booted from the Capitol campus.
Paging Dr. Fauci! https://t.co/zyDOJ1rE6l
— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) November 18, 2020
She said that masks can be unhealthy, cited other studies mentioning that they don’t stop the spread of COVID-19, and claimed that they are “draconian … tyrannical.”
This week, Sen. Rand Paul joined in criticizing the “forever” wearing of masks.
Today, a massive Danish study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine appeared to back them up by finding that the device didn’t work better than not wearing one when out in public.
Some 4,860 people completed the study. It found that 42 people in the mask group became infected versus 53 in the unmasked group, which is not statistically significant.
“Our results suggest that the recommendation to wear a surgical mask when outside the home among others did not reduce, at conventional levels of statistical significance, the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in mask wearers in a setting where social distancing and other public health measures were in effect, mask recommendations were not among those measures, and community use of masks was uncommon,” said the study.
However, it did add that the results, despite the unusually large sample, were inconclusive.
