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We’re continuing to try to follow the bizarre and fast-changing guidance on COVID from the White House. Remember when they told you the last administration was incompetent? We’ve never seen anything like this. It’s beyond belief.
It was just about a week ago that Rochelle Walensky of the CDC did her best to terrify all of us over the new Indian strain of COVID. Walensky described the so-called “Delta Variant” as, quote, “one of the most infectious respiratory viruses we know of, and that I have seen in my 20-year career.” An internal CDC document summed it up in martial terms. Quote: “The war has changed,” wrote the CDC. In response to these horrifying developments, the administration immediately re-implemented indoor mask mandates, even for people who’ve been fully vaccinated. That was enough to get even the deeply-incurious American news media asking questions. Wait a second. If the vaccines work, why the masks? So, they started digging and they didn’t have to dig much.
On Friday morning, the Washington Post ran this headline: “Vaccinated people made up three-quarters of those infected in a massive Massachusetts COVID-19 outbreak, pivotal CDC study finds.” The New York Times ran a similar piece — again, based on numbers from the CDC.
And yet, just minutes after those articles appeared, the White House panicked.
A senior member of its “COVID-19 response team,” a man who is not a doctor, but instead a career flack called Ben Wakana, jumped on social media to attack the media and in fact attack the administration’s own scientists. Here was Wakana’s message to The New York Times on Twitter over the weekend. He wrote it in all-caps as if he was shouting.
Quote: “VACCINATED PEOPLE DO NOT TRANSMIT THE VIRUS AT THE SAME RATE AS UNVACCINATED PEOPLE AND IF YOU FAIL TO INCLUDE THAT CONTEXT YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG,” he barked. He went on to call The Washington Post’s coverage of it “irresponsible.” And he added this, quote,
“Let’s be clear. If 10 vaccinated people walk into a room full of COVID, about 9 of them would walk out of the room WITH NO COVID. Nine of them.” But is that true? Ben Wakana, the one who is not a doctor but instead a flak, didn’t provide a citation for that statistic.
In fact, judging by the CDC’s own numbers, it appears to be wrong – in other words, it is classic “misinformation,” possibly Russian in origin. Yet strangely, Ben Wakana, who knows much less about science than, say, Alex Jones, was not banned from the internet. He kept tweeting. And then, just a few hours later, he got backup support from Rochelle Walensky herself. The vaccine works, Walensky shouted. In fact, it works so well, you may soon be forced to take it:
BRET BAIER (Friday): Are you for mandating a vaccine on a federal level.
WALENSKY: Umm, you know, that’s something that I think the administration is looking into. It’s something that I think we’re looking to seek approval of from the vaccine, overall, I think in general, I am all for more vaccination. You know, I have nothing further to say on that except that we’re looking into those policies and quite honestly, as people are doing that locally, those are individual local decisions as well.
‘So we’re looking into a federal vaccine mandate.’
But then, just minutes after she said that, Rochelle Walensky went on Twitter to take it back. Quote: “To clarify: “There will be no nationwide mandate. I was referring to mandates by private institutions and portions of the federal government.”
Of course, that’s not at all what she said, she said we’re looking into a federal mandate nationwide.
Then on Sunday, the head of the N.I.H., the highly-political Francis Collins, explained that those “mandates by private institutions” might look like this:
JAKE TAPPER: Do you think as a public health measure it would be good for more businesses to require vaccine credentials in order to have vaccinated customers?
FRANCIS COLLINS: As a public health person who wants to see this pandemic end, yes. I think anything we can do to encourage reluctant folks to get vaccinated because they’ll want to be part of these public events, that’s a good thing. I’m delighted to see employers like Disney and Walmart coming out and asking their staff to be vaccinated. I’m glad to see the president has said all federal employees. I oversee NIH. With 45,000 people need to get vaccinated or if they’re not to get regular testing which is inconvenient. All of those steps, I think is in the right direction.
Who is this old fool? Employers asking their employees to get vaccinated? They’re not asking them they’re requiring them as a condition of employment – they’re forcing them.
“But that’s not a mandate: Just get vaccinated, or you can’t live in the United States anymore.”
That’s the message from the head of the NIH – who still has not explained to what extent his agency funded the development of this virus in the first place. OK.
But, Francis Collins at the same time wants you to know that even if you have been vaccinated, you can’t go back to your normal life. The vaccine is perfect – but you still have to wear a mask and can’t go outside.
Large gatherings, for example, are out of the question. Why? Because of the possibility that a handful of people aren’t vaccinated may be hurt.
“If there are 100 people,” Collins said recently, “how are you really going to be sure about people’s vaccination status?’
On the other hand, why would you need to be sure, if vaccination is a choice.
Collins did not explain how unvaccinated people could possibly pose a threat to vaccinated people, because remember that the vaccines work so well, we have to mandate them for public health reasons. But at the same time people who have been vaccinated are threatened by those who don’t.
Are you following this? Does it make any sense to you at all? Do you need a medical degree to know it’s complete nonsense? No, you don’t.
Here’s one thing you should know — these restrictions do not apply to everyone. Prominent Democrats have been exempted from them.
It’s obvious to anyone who watched the Biden administration berate its own scientists on social media this weekend. The science is not settled. Science rarely is settled, in fact, it’s a process of seeking the truth – it’s not the same a political directive, just because the person in power tells you something doesn’t mean it’s ‘science’. Just because CNN defends that person exempting himself from his own rules does not make that science.
But rather than admit this obvious truth, a truth that almost all Americans understand intuitively the people running our government — including our public health establishment which they employ — panic. How long until they’re kicking us off beaches and locking us in our homes? Will we be able to complain about it when they do?
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson’s opening commentary on the August 2, 2021, edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
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