Earlier this week, Director of the National Institutes of Health Dr. Francis Collins appeared on CNN. There he dispenses some of the weirdest advice of the COVID era. He tells parents to wear masks at home around their own children if those children are unvaccinated, but the parents are.
COVID vaccines aren’t even yet approved for kids below 12. So that’s an issue. Another is the fact that COVID still is very unlikely to spread to or from kids. They’re not vectors for this virus. Still, Dr. Collins clearly says to wear masks at home around your kids, even admitting that it’s weird. Watch the video. He said it without any evident hesitation.
NIH director Francis Collins: “It may sound weird” but parents should wear masks at home in front of their unvaccinated kids pic.twitter.com/ZKt8czU5aP
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 3, 2021
Well, by that afternoon Dr. Collins took to Twitter to backtrack on the very same weird advice he’d dispensed earlier on national TV.
Let me clarify the masking message that I garbled on @NewDay this morning. Vaccinated parents who live in communities with high COVID transmission rates should mask when out in public indoor settings to minimize risks to their unvaccinated kids. No need to mask at home.
— Francis S. Collins (@NIHDirector) August 3, 2021
I’m a follow-the-science kind of guy. How does one follow this science? Collins didn’t “garble” his messaging. He said one thing. Then a few hours later said the opposite. Call me paranoid, but it looks like someone got to him and told him to get out there and change his tune. The question then is, on what basis? Was his science wrong, which wouldn’t be a good thing given the fact that he directs the NIH, or was his message bad for politics? Which is worse?
If your doctor flipped over like this about an important health matter in your life, would you keep going to that doctor?
Well, America, we’re stuck with ’em. And we’re stuck with a president who’s just as useless. What’s the science behind pestering Americans to get vaccinated while dumping thousands of COVID+ illegals all over the place?
Fauci famously flipped on masks, which was bad enough. The medical establishment went all-in for BLM’s marches while keeping our churches, businesses, and schools closed. Both of those damaged the medical establishment’s credibility. They’ve had time to see the results of their messaging and get better.
A year plus into this, after the messaging has proven to be counterproductive countless times, the head of the NIH can’t even keep his science straight for half a day. No wonder Americans are just fed up and done with all this. I live around blue Austin, the masking capital of Texas, but nowadays even with the Delta variant posing a new threat, hardly anyone is wearing masks. That’s probably partly down to many of us being vaccinated, but it’s also partly down to just being wrung out. We’re done with it. It’s all feeling like a hundred cries of “Wolf!” a week. No one can keep up with it and fewer seem interested in even trying to.
I’ll leave you with this.
Since Camp Fantastic, a summer camp for kids with cancer, has to go virtual this year, my wife, Diane, and I made this #COVID19 parody on “Puff, the Magic Dragon” to let the kids know we’re with them in spirit during these challenging times. #NIH pic.twitter.com/N4pbo2eM6r
— Francis S. Collins (@NIHDirector) August 14, 2020
Do kids now even know what “Puff the Magic Dragon” was?
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