CDC Drops Mask Guidelines in Time for Biden SOTU

BUCK: So as we had predicted, the CDC, just in advance of the State of the Union — what a coincidence, Clay!

CLAY: Probably coincidental. Yeah.

BUCK: They named the Supreme Court nominee, and they tell us that masking is gonna go down. It’s not away. I want to be very clear. I’m not celebrating this. I’m actually angry that we’re still even talking about this because they’re such lunatics after all the failures — that’s right, Facebook and Twitter and the various censors and Politifact, the failures — of mask mandates, the obviousness of masking as idiocy.

The CDC, according to ABC News, “CDC to ease masking recommendations,” this just broke, “for 70% of the country including inside of schools.” Oh, gosh. Here we go. They’re gonna have new metrics, folks, where they’re gonna assign whether you live in an area of low, medium, or high-risk transmission and you’re supposed to gauge the hospital burden from covid and new hospitalizations. So it’s new covid hospitalizations, current beds occupied by covid, hospital capacity, and new covid cases.

Yeah. Sure. This is like a math equation that Matt Damon is figuring out in Good Will Hunting on the board at MIT. No one’s going to do this, okay? I mean, no one is really going to care about this, but they’re trying to make it seem all science-y that, Clay, the mask mandates will be dropped in a whole lot places just in time for the State of the Union — and as we’re basically in March when covid recedes. What a shock.

CLAY: I think a big part of this, Buck — and we’re gonna be talk with Alex Berenson at the top of the next hour about the latest data on covid. So that conversation should be something you basically won’t be able to hear hardly anywhere else in the media. But to me what this represents is… Remember last May they did away with the mask mandate. Much fanfare, tried to argue, “Hey, the vaccines are here now. We’re not gonna need masks, covid’s over.” This was last year.

And then they had to bring it back later in the summer. What they are trying to do with this one is two things, I think. One, not allow the unvaccinated to feel like they have free rein to not wear masks even though people like me are not wearing masks — and remember, Buck, they tried to say back in May of last year, “Oh, if you’re vaccinated, you don’t have to wear a mask,” but then everybody just said, “Well, then how you gonna know either way?” And then the second part is, if they have to adjust this again, they’re trying to avoid declaring victory right now, which they came awfully close to doing in that July 4th speech that Joe Biden gave before we ended up with even worse on rates of covid infection. So anybody who’s still listening to the CDC, I think does not have a functional brain.

Basically, what it sounds like their guidelines are reflecting is you should analyze risk and decide whether or not it makes sense for you to be wearing a mask. And, by the way, based on the data, it doesn’t really make sense for anybody to be wearing a mask. But slowly they are tiptoeing up to a rational perspective here, given the fact that they have failed in any way with mask mandates or with vaccine mandates, which are fading, Buck, so fast. The idea that you have to show your vaccine ID was gonna last for two or three months at most. By the time we get to May, I think the idea the vaccine mandates had ever existed will seem even crazier than it does today.

BUCK: We’re gonna keep bringing this up because we —

CLAY: Consequences.

BUCK: — view it as an important mission between now and Election Day. Because for a lot of you who live in Texas and Florida and Tennessee and red states out there, you’re thinking, yeah, wasn’t really that bad for me. Okay. But there are people that live in purple states that did. Look at Virginia, for example, went through the lunacy of Governor Northam and all the mandates and then Loudoun County deciding. And we have large audiences who listen in New York State, in California.

There are governor’s races that are going on; there’s congressional seats that are up for grabs. We’re gonna remind everybody. They made you do this. If you live in one of the lockdown places across the country, they made you do all this stuff, they yelled at you, they made you get shots. They wanted to make you get shots for airline travel for all of us, by the way, and Clay they were wrong. They were wrong. It wasn’t even a worthwhile tradeoff where we could argue. They made us do things — they infringed on your freedom and your liberties — for no attendant benefit because they’re lunatics who worshiped Fauci. I’m not letting anybody forget it.

CLAY: And there need to be severe consequences for it. An early preview, the reason why they are dropping all of this in advance of the State of the Union, by the way, is partly to allow Biden to take a victory lap but also because, Buck, they’re trying to look toward the fall, and what are they gonna run on? Inflation’s not going away. The border mess is not going away.

We’re not suddenly gonna start declining the amount of murders that are out there. Afghanistan, Ukraine, all of that is going to continue to linger. Their only hope — and I really do believe, sadly, this is where they are — is that they can try and convince some people who are not very smart that the reality is they were able to beat covid. That’s what they’re gonna try to sell.