CBS Mornings and NBC’s Today kept up the mental psychosis on Wednesday when it came to ensuring viewers stay crippled in fear of COVID-19 and view required masking as the lone backstop against illness and death. Specifically, they argued flying’s “less safe” and “cases will continue to go up” because Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle ended the CDC mask mandate on flying and public transportation.
In the case of CBS, they brought in former CDC head Dr. Tom Frieden to give their takes the backing of Science. Frieden didn’t waste any time, arguing required masking is needed in the much the same way we have drunk driving laws, food inspections, and requirements for medical prescriptions:
[W]e rely on the society to make sure that your kid doesn’t get hit by a drunk driver, that the food we eat in a restaurant doesn’t make us terribly sick, that the rest — that the medicines we pick up at the pharmacy are not contaminated. In the same way, we need the government and society to be able to protect us if a more dangerous variant comes or another health threat comes.
Socialist co-host Tony Dokoupil brought up immunocompromised people, which led Frieden to insist the way to ensure their safety is “if everyone is masking” and “[t]hat’s why we are all connected and...that my health depends on what you do.”
Fill-in co-host Vladimir Duthiers asked if it would be safe for his immunocompromised father to fly so long as he was masked, but Frieden replied it wouldn’t because, due to Mizelle wiping out the mandates, “flying just got less safe.”
Co-host and Democratic Party donor Gayle King upped the ante, lamenting that “cases are already going up now” and wondering whether the ruling will exacerbate it.
But worse yet, she condemned the notion that the government couldn’t forcibly demand everyone be masked:
That’s what I struggle with and I struggle with people making the decision I’m not going to mask. If you could not wear a mask and it only affects you, good on you. But it affects so many other people.
Ah, yes. Pesky freedom, Gayle!
Frieden validated her sheepish world and said it “doesn’t make a lot of sense” to grant us peons the opportunity to be maskless.
Only footnoting vaccinations and therapeutics, Frieden argued for continued masking for an unknown period because “a more dangerous variant” could arise that’s more deadly.
“We really need these kinds of tools to protect people, not just to save lives, but also to keep our economy growing,” he added.
Over on NBC, longtime correspondent Tom Costello argued that, anecdotally, masking is widely popular because masks have “kept them healthy for the past two years” and people “are worried about a new COVID variant spreading fast with 2,600 deaths just last week.”
Costello cited a tweet from new White House COVID coordinator Dr. Ashish wishing everyone had given the CDC two more weeks of required masking to obtain enough data about the new variant, but that’s hollow given that time the government asked people to stay home two weeks to slow the spread.
Costello brought in MSNBC contributor Dr. Vin Gupta before ending with concerns about how Mizelle could have made it harder to keep people safe in future pandemics (click “expand”):
GUPTA: Is this the type of precedence we want to set that the CDC can be undermined by a federal judge in Florida? Is that the type of precedence here? I think that is terrible precedence.
SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: Well, speaking of the legal precedence, in order for anything to change, the Justice Department would have to appeal the ruling against the mask mandate. And the Justice Department is still up in the air about that.
COSTELLO: Yeah, Justice may appeal if the CDC wants to pursue the mask mandate. CDC so far isn't talking. Listen, Justice would likely not request a stay because the cat’s out of the bag. People do not want to start masking up again and the thinking this is a political liability for white house and the President. But they are concerned about precedent. If the CDC is not allowed to enact these types of health measures in the event of another pandemic, then that’s something that they feel like they need to address now, appeal it now and try to establish a proper — in their view, a proper working relationship through this.
To that, co-host Savannah Guthrie fretted it would be “rolling the dice on a favorable ruling.”
In the 8:00 a.m. Eastern hour, Costello was back and reiterated how “quite a few people” have told him “they’re just not comfortable yet dropping the mask given the fact that COVID is spreading and...many people say they’ve been very healthy for the last two years, not even a cold.”
Wednesday’s spreading of psychological paralysis over COVID was made possible thanks to the help of advertisers such as Ensure (on CBS) and Kohl’s (on NBC). Follow the links to see their contact information at the MRC’s Conservatives Fight Back page.
To see the relevant transcripts from April 20, click here (for CBS) and here (for NBC).
