For weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services told us not to wear face masks. The Surgeon General even warned that mass use of masks could “increase the spread of the coronavirus.”
“My nose tells me,” I posted on Facebook weeks ago, “that all the info about how we don’t need face-masks is to cover up for the lack of face-masks.”
My family is very grateful to a Taiwanese friend, who mailed me masks — not the N95 masks, which the Taiwanese government is donating in large quantities, but masks of excellent non-medical quality.
Last Wednesday, CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell noted that a large percentage of people spreading the virus are asymptomatic, meaning they don’t know they have it. She asked Dr. Anthony Fauci with the White House Coronavirus Taskforce: “Should we be advising people to wear masks?”
“The primary people who need masks are healthcare workers,” the doctor replied, before admitting that if supplies weren’t so limited, wearing a mask was “a potentially good way … you could have an impact with preventing transmission.”
Days later, President Trump passed on a CDC advisory to the same effect.
Americans had figured out the initial lie, and were already making their own and posting how to do so on social media. Now that’ll ramp up.
Initially, our leaders didn’t level with us. They could have. Americans seem amazingly cooperative, to say the least.
Government folks need to stop masking the truth from the public. That way they might earn more public trust.
Which sure can be useful during a crisis.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
2 replies on “America Unmasked”
Indeed, masks went from “don’t wear” to “should wear” to “MUST wear” (as of April 7) in the space of a week in Miami.
My Mother was a nurse when I was a little guy. I never seemed to get the Mumps. Mom would know who had the Mumps in our area and would try to put me in touch with them to catch that disease but I never seemed to come down with them. The doctor figured I was asymptomatic.