
Hmm…


The Supreme Court last week rejected the idea that Congress gave the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) the power to stop landlords from evicting tenants who fail to pay their rent. Unfazed by that setback, the Biden administration this week suggested that the CDC has the power to demand that every public school in the country force students to wear face masks.
Both incidents show how readily President Joe Biden deploys dubious legal arguments to defend unprecedented power grabs in the name of fighting COVID-19. If successful, those arguments would undermine federalism, the rule of law, and the separation of powers.
The CDC argued that evictions could promote COVID-19 transmission by forcing people to move into “congregate or shared living setting[s].” It said its moratorium therefore was authorized by a 1944 law that allows regulations deemed “necessary” to prevent the interstate spread of “communicable diseases.”
Like most of the federal judges who have addressed the issue, the Supreme Court did not buy that argument. “It is hard to see what measures this interpretation would place outside the CDC’s reach,” it noted, “and the Government has identified no limit…beyond the requirement that the CDC deem a measure ‘necessary.'”
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the American people have been told to “follow the science.” Yet for a year and a half, they’ve heard contradicting messages from self-appointed prophets of “the science” like Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
We learned that politicians who claimed their decisions were science-driven often ignored scientific findings that didn’t fit certain political narratives. We discovered that scientists are fallible human beings, and some would let personal interests and political views cloud their judgment.
Is science itself one of the victims of the COVID-19 pandemic? I asked Dr. Scott Atlas at the 13th annual Freedom Conference hosted by the Steamboat Institute, a Colorado-based nonprofit organization. Formerly a professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center, Atlas is now a senior fellow in health policy at the Hoover Institution.
Atlas has been under constant attacks by the left and the corporate media since he served as a special adviser to former President Trump and a member of the White House coronavirus task force from August to November 2020. The New York Times and the Washington Post ran hit pieces on Atlas, questioning his qualifications despite his distinguished career and scholarship.
Google-owned YouTube also removed a 50-minute video of Atlas’s interview with the Hoover Institute. Twitter took down his tweet that questioned the effectiveness of masks.
Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren appeared to join real American Indians Saturday when she partied maskless in defiance of New Mexico’s mask mandate at Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s wedding.
Photos obtained and published by the Washington Free Beacon show Warren with the first American Indian cabinet secretary at a tribal resort in a state where Democrat Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has reimposed indoor mask requirements regardless of vaccination status.
“The re-implemented mask requirement applies to all individuals aged 2 and older in all indoor public settings — except when eating or drinking,” Grisham’s office wrote in an Aug. 17 press release with the policy expiration date set for Sept. 15.
A spokesman for the Interior Department wrote in an emailed statement to The Federalist “guests were required to be vaccinated and wear masks,” to be “consistent with CDC guidance and New Mexico’s public health orders.”
But Saturday’s maskless celebrations, illustrated by photos from the Free Beacon, mark the latest episode of Democrats skirting restrictive COVID protocols imposed by their own statist politicians within liberal enclaves of the country.
Amid the intense battle over mask mandates, New York magazine noted a large-scale study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found no statistically significant difference in schools that required students to wear masks compared to schools where masks were optional.
The study analyzed some 90,000 elementary students in 169 Georgia schools from Nov. 16 to Dec. 11.
“The 21% lower incidence in schools that required mask use among students was not statistically significant compared with schools where mask use was optional,” the CDC said.
“This finding might be attributed to higher effectiveness of masks among adults, who are at higher risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection but might also result from differences in mask-wearing behavior among students in schools with optional requirements.”
The American Civil Liberties Union is suing South Carolina over a ban on mask mandates in schools.
Earlier this summer, the South Carolina state legislature passed a budget bill with conditions prohibiting school districts from using government funds to “require that its students and/or employees wear a face mask at any of its education facilities.” Scientific studies are clear that COVID-19 transmission among children is much lower than among adults but that hasn’t stopped the Biden administration, the CDC, teachers’ unions, and now the ACLU from pushing for students and vaccinated teachers to mask up this fall.
The leftist activist group, which represents several parents of children with disabilities and other groups, is targeting Republican Gov. Henry McMaster, his administration, and certain school districts for prohibiting face-covering requirements because they say the rule “effectively exclude[s] these students with disabilities from participation in the public education system, in violation of the [Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act].”
“School districts with students who have disabilities, including underlying medical conditions, that make them more likely to contract and/or become severely ill from a COVID-19 infection have a legal obligation to ensure that those children can attend school with the knowledge that the school district has followed recommended protocols to ensure their safety,” the lawsuit states, citing the CDC’s anti-science universal masking protocols for children as young as two years old.
Newly published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, a team of German researchers acknowledge that theirs is the first comprehensive investigation into the adverse health effects that masks can cause — a surprising fact considering that many countries around the world introduced universal mask wearing in public spaces for containing SARS-CoV-2 in 2020 as a mandatory health policy without investigating nor communicating to their citizens the true risks of masks, hence violating informed consent.
According to the German research team, their work is designed to “provide a first, rapid, scientific presentation of the risks of general mandatory mask use by focusing on the possible adverse medical effects of masks, especially in certain diagnostic, patient and user groups.”
Less than three months ago, the Centers for Disease Control published a mostly-ignored, large-scale study of Covid-19 transmission in US schools which concluded that while masking then-unvaccinated teachers and improving ventilation was associated with lower levels of virus transmission in schools – social distancing, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and forcing students to wear masks did not result in a statistically significant benefit.
A few major news outlets covered its release by briefly reiterating the study’s summary: that masking then-unvaccinated teachers and improving ventilation with more fresh air were associated with a lower incidence of the virus in schools. Those are common-sense measures, and the fact that they seem to work is reassuring but not surprising. Other findings of equal importance in the study, however, were absent from the summary and not widely reported. These findings cast doubt on the impact of many of the most common mitigation measures in American schools. Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit. In other words, these measures could not be said to be effective. -NYMag
According to the report, scientists believe that the CDC’s decision to intentionally omit the findings on student masking from a summary of the study amounts to “file drawering” the findings – the practice of burying studies that don’t have statistically significant results.
Prior to facemask mandates as an alleged preventive for Covid infection and transmission, such masks were infrequently worn in hospitals and other medical facilities. They were only used in operating theatres or for visiting seriously ill patients in order to prevent infection from spit or droplets into open wounds or to partially protect visitors from acquiring and transmitting pathogens more dangerous than Covid. Many doctors and nurses have told LifeSite that for decades, if not longer, staff wearing medical masks were an uncommon sight in health care facilities other than as mentioned.
No studies were needed to justify this practice since most understood viruses were far too small to be stopped by the wearing of most masks, other than sophisticated ones designed for that task and which were too costly and complicated for the general public to properly wear and keep changing or cleaning. It was also understood that long mask wearing was unhealthy for wearers for common sense and basic science reasons.
There has been an international flood of lies about mask wearing in order to justify the bizarre and disturbing situation we have today of almost everyone wearing masks in many regions, inside and outside healthcare facilities, in schools with children of all ages, during sports events, in churches, in grocery stores and all commercial facilities, while driving and walking, and long after peak infection has passed.
It has also continued long after it was discovered that Covid was not nearly as dangerous as we were led to believe, that many of the mitigation policies caused serious damage of all kinds, including many deaths, and long after prevention and treatment protocols were discovered and used with great success, and the very best ones often criminally suppressed by government and health authorities.
The unnecessary and greatly exaggerated fear during the first few months of this pandemic, which would never have been labeled a pandemic until the WHO unilaterally changed the pandemic definition to include much less dangerous pathogens, has been manipulated to continue to this day, unlike past experiences with similar virus outbreaks. There have been numerous lies fed to the public by the WHO, national and regional government leaders and health bureaucrats and the media and many other institutions – all certainly for the purpose of maintaining fear until the large majority of the public has been injected with the poorly tested, unnecessary and dangerous Covid vaccines for which we have no evidence of their long-term safety.

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