Source: American Spectator, By David Catron, September 10, 2023
When a bipartisan congressional bill ending the COVID-19 national emergency was reluctantly signed by President Biden last April, most Americans hoped that the politicization of the virus was at an end. Those hopes dimmed two weeks ago when Dr. Anthony Fauci materialized on CNN, like Banquo’s ghost at Macbeth’s feast, to dispute a widely publicized study showing that masking doesn’t reduce the spread of COVID or any of its variants. After host Michael Smerconish described the study’s findings, Fauci brayed that it somehow helps “at an individual level.” This is nonsense, of course, but his return to the talking head circuit tells us something important about Democratic intentions in 2024.
This illusion must be bolstered by fake science that exaggerates the danger posed by the virus and the delusion that vote fraud is “extremely rare.”
Those intentions became all too clear a week later, when Senate Democrats killed a bill introduced by Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) that would have banned mask mandates for public schools, domestic air travel, and public transit. The remarks of Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who led the charge against Vance’s bill, made it clear that the Democrats will bring back mask mandates and scare tactics to accomplish their goals: “[I]f in the opinion of public health officials, strategies can be adopted using masks that reduced the likelihood that more will die, we should give them that freedom to make those decisions.” Vance refuted the claim that masks reduce COVID transmission when he introduced his bill:
It’s not just that masks, according to randomized, controlled studies do no good. It’s that they can actively cause harm. We know that a generation of school children has suffered significant speech and developmental disabilities because this country panicked instead of using its brain and forced toddlers and small children to wear masks. We cannot return to the failed policies of the COVID pandemic. I’m not mad that we screwed up. I made mistakes, many people in this body made mistakes. What I do think that we should avoid is repeating the mistakes in 2023. Let’s learn from the mistakes that we made instead of just doubling down on them.
Vance’s reasoning is perfectly sound, of course, and if the Democrats favored masking for health reasons his bill would have easily passed by unanimous consent. For them, however, “mitigation measures” such as masking and vaccines are about power. During the same week that they killed Sen. Vance’s bill, Senate Democrats also blocked a bill introduced by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that would have banned vaccine and mask mandates for Senate pages. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) justified killing the bill based on the following pretext: “The Senate has a duty of care with respect to the pages. Their welfare is our responsibility.” Sen. Paul denounced this claim as “obscene” and excoriated Cardin and the Democrats:
This is a situation where the Democrats are in favor of mandating a vaccine that puts their health at risk. We are telling kids all across America, you cannot come up here unless you get what the Democrats tell you is the best thing for your health, and even though there are some scientists who say that it actually may imperil your health, you don’t get a choice and you can’t be part of the nationwide Senate program. You can’t be part of this elite group unless you submit. Unless you bend the knee to the Democrats, unless you say, “My body belongs to the Democrat party, my body will be injected with whatever the Democrats tell me I need to do.”
If you are unmoved by the plight of Senate pages, think of it as a trial run. The Democrats and the corporate media are obviously hyping the advent of a new COVID variant and the usual fall uptick in cases to encourage a return to masking and other ineffective “mitigation measures” at public schools, colleges, hospitals, and businesses. And it’s working. Rosemary Hills Elementary School in Silver Spring, Maryland, has implemented a “temporary” mask mandate. Kinterbish Junior High School in Cuba, Alabama, has likewise imposed a mandate. Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Georgia, has implemented a “two-week” mandate. Dillard University in New Orleans issued a mandate “while it assesses the trends.” (READ MORE: The Democrat Plan to Pump and Dump Trump)
Meanwhile, hospitals are already jumping on the bandwagon again. Auburn Community Hospital in New York has imposed mask requirements. Upstate University Hospital System has advised its employees and visitors to mask up again. United Health Services in Binghamton, New York, has revived its mask mandate for employees, patients, and guests. Likewise, Kaiser Permanente in Santa Rosa, California, has reinstated its mask mandate requirement. Meanwhile, “America’s Doctor” appeared Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” to encourage the madness and attempt to delegitimize the study noted above. When asked by host Jon Karl if it had demonstrated that masking turned out to be ineffective, Fauci lied:
You know, Jon, some of the studies are confusing. The study that recently has been now quoted a lot and causing a lot of confusion is this Cochrane Study which even the people who run the Cochrane Study say that that study can be misleading because people have commented on that study saying absolutely masks don’t work, which is absolutely not the case because there are a number of studies that show that masks actually do work. And there’s a lot of confusion when you take a broad series of studies, and you look at them in a meta-analysis. Only a couple of those studies have been specifically looking at COVID. So, I think we better be careful.
This is more subterfuge from the good doctor. As Bret Stephens wrote in the New York Times last February, the Cochrane meta-study was “based on 78 randomized controlled trials, six of them during the Covid pandemic, with a total of 610,872 participants in multiple countries.” Stephens pointed out that government health “experts” and the media mask cult began attacking the study immediately after it was published. Their political investment in the mask myth was so great that they subjected Cochrane to the kind of abuse they had heaped on other heretics. A classic example can be found in the Wall Street Journal report on how Fauci worked with the media to trash the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.
There are two facts we need to remember about COVID-19. It will remain with us as a seasonal “flu-like” ailment and as an excuse for the Democrats to foment fear of crowded spaces — like polling places — which will make mail-in voting seem “safer.” This illusion must be bolstered by fake science that exaggerates the danger posed by the virus and the delusion that vote fraud is “extremely rare.” Nearly 20 years ago a commission co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter concluded, “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” The Democrats took this very seriously — as an opportunity. The Republicans evidently didn’t bother to read it. That failure may cost them dearly in the 2024 election.
