Buttigieg: Masks needed for airplanes but not correspondents’ dinner

By Art Moore

Pete Buttigieg (MSNBC video screenshot)
Pete Buttigieg (MSNBC video screenshot)

Confronted with why he and President Biden are attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with Washington’s elites this Saturday while the administration contests the lifting of the airline mask mandate in court, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg showed he’s not up to speed on COVID-19 science.

Fox News anchor Bret Baier posed the question in an interview Wednesday evening on his Fox News show “Special Report.”

“Most of us understand the difference between a hotel ballroom and an airplane,” Buttigieg replied.

However, as Hot Air blogger Allahpundit pointed out, “the difference between a crowded ballroom and a crowded airplane is that the airplane is certainly safer.”

The blogger pointed out that Buttigieg could have emphasized that the prestigious guests at the dinner Saturday night will be required to show proof of a negative COVID test taken that day. But those tests are not 100% accurate.

Airliners, however, while not requiring a COVID test, have been shown through numerous studies to be among the safest environments, with very low risk of spreading disease.

About 25% to 30% of the cabin air is recycled through a HEPA filter, and the rest is expelled every couple of minutes, meaning the cabin has new air every two to five minutes.

Dr. David Freedman, an infectious disease doctor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, as Allahpundit pointed out, affirmed the superior features of airliner cabins in an interview with the New York Times.

“The air circulation on a plane is better than in an office building, better than your apartment because the air is changed more times per hour – most planes change several times per hour, plus it’s filtered, which isn’t the case in your office or apartment,” Freedman said.

‘Our system does not permit agencies to act unlawfully’
Dr. Anthony Fauci, amid a flip-flop on whether or not the pandemic is over, told CBS News he won’t be attending the dinner Saturday due to safety concerns.

Fauci, Biden’s top medical adviser, has complained that the federal court that blocked the Biden administration’s federal transport mask mandate “superseded the authority of the CDC.”

He told CNN he believes the mask mandate is “a CDC decision, and that’s very bad precedent when you have courts making a decision, and looking at what the basis of the decision was, it was not sound.”

On April 18, U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle ruled that the CDC failed to provide justification for the Biden administration’s extension of the mandate 15 days to May 3 and did not go through the required notice and comment period for federal rulemaking. The judge found that the mandate, in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, was outside the scope of the CDC’s authority, calling it “arbitrary” and “capricious.”

“Because our system does not permit agencies to act unlawfully even in pursuit of desirable ends, the court declares unlawful and vacates the mask mandate,” the Trump-appointed judge wrote.

Major U.S. airlines immediately made masks voluntary, putting the carriers in line with major foreign airlines that already had made that move. Amtrak also dropped its mask requirement while stating “masks are welcome and remain an important preventive measure against COVID-19.”

One day after the ruling, the Justice Department said it would appeal the decision. The CDC argues that the seven-day moving average of COVID cases has increased.

However, every state that had a mask mandate has lifted it. And COVID-19 data collected by the New York Times shows that the mandates had no impact on case rates. The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal published a graph based on that data comparing the cases in the 11 states that never mandated masks with the 39 that did.

Fauci, in fact, told then Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell in a February 2020 email that masks “are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection.”

“The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you,” wrote the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low risk location,” Fauci stated.

Similarly, Fauci spoke out against universal masking amid a pandemic in a “60 Minutes” interview on month later.  He warned of “unintended consequences,” saying there’s “no reason to be walking around with a mask” in “the middle of an outbreak.”

Fauci later said he told Americans they didn’t need to wear a mask because he wanted to ensure there was enough supply for frontline workers.

However, at the time of his interview, the executive director of the World Health Organization health emergencies program, Dr. Mike Ryan, said there was “no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit.”

“In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly,” he said.

The WHO at the time recommended people not wear face masks unless they are sick with COVID-19 or caring for someone who is sick.

In March 2020, the CDC also said masks “are usually not recommended” in “non-health care settings.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Last year, America’s doctors, nurses and paramedics were celebrated as frontline heroes battling a fearsome new pandemic. Today, under Joe Biden, tens of thousands of these same heroes are denounced as rebels, conspiracy theorists, extremists and potential terrorists. Along with massive numbers of police, firemen, Border Patrol agents, Navy SEALs, pilots, air-traffic controllers, and countless other truly essential Americans, they’re all considered so dangerous as to merit termination, their professional and personal lives turned upside down due to their decision not to be injected with the experimental COVID vaccines. Biden’s tyrannical mandate threatens to cripple American society – from law enforcement to airlines to commercial supply chains to hospitals. It’s already happening. But the good news is that huge numbers of “yesterday’s heroes” are now fighting back – bravely and boldly. The whole epic showdown is laid out as never before in the sensational October issue of WND’s monthly Whistleblower magazine, titled “THE GREAT AMERICAN REBELLION: ‘We will not comply!’ COVID-19 power grab ignites bold new era of national defiance.”

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Art Moore

Art Moore, co-author of the best-selling book "See Something, Say Nothing," entered the media world as a PR assistant for the Seattle Mariners and a correspondent covering pro and college sports for Associated Press Radio. He reported for a Chicago-area daily newspaper and was senior news writer for Christianity Today magazine and an editor for Worldwide Newsroom before joining WND shortly after 9/11. He earned a master's degree in communications from Wheaton College. Read more of Art Moore's articles here.


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