‘A Mask Can Be Your Best Friend’: Cable Shows Hand the Mics Back to Public-Health Experts to Resume Covid Panic

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look into the renewed push for masking and cover more media misses.

Some ‘Experts’ Have Us Asking, ‘What Year Is It?’

What’s old is new again in TV news. If you had turned on the television any time in the past several weeks, you might think you’d been transported to 2020.

A mish-mash of medical “experts” have returned to the airwaves to warn Americans it’s time for a return to masking amid a “summer spike” in Covid-19.

Last week, Dr. Celine Gounder appeared on CBS Mornings to disapprove of host Gayle King’s nonchalant approach to the virus.

King began the segment with a note that hospitalization rates had risen 12.5 percent in recent weeks, but that many people are “so ready to move on,” and that it has been a long time since she’d even thought about Covid herself.

Diagnosing the rising number of cases, Gounder said, “It’s a combination of people letting down their guard. I think a lot of people think we were in this bunker during the pandemic. ‘It’s going to go away when I come out.’ And unfortunately it’s still there. So just because you think you’re done with Covid doesn’t mean the virus is not still circulating.”

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COVID hospitalization rates are up more than 12% in the most recent week surveyed by the CDC.

Dr. @CelineGounder says the new variant circulating is “not more severe” than previous — but people should still seek protection by getting the vaccine and using masks. pic.twitter.com/jGH5k4MImC

— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) August 14, 2023

“Letting our guard down how?” King asked.

“Well, we’re not masking as much for example in public transportation on the plane —”

King jumped in to say she isn’t masking and to ask if she should be.

“Well if you’re in a crowded indoor public space you might want to in certain situations, particularly as we go into the fall/winter seasons,” she said, later noting, however, that the latest Covid-19 variant “isn’t something to panic about.”

Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina took the masking agenda one step further during an appearance on PBS Newshour earlier this month, when she suggested people should wear masks again — even at home.

“Yes, you should wear, be wearing masks in crowded areas, especially during a surge,” Jetelina said when asked by anchor John Yang to give her take on masks.

“But what about at home and when you’re walking on the street?” he asked.

She replied: “So, certainly, at home, it works, if you want to reduce household transmission.”

She had to draw the line somewhere, however. “I wouldn’t wear a mask when walking your dog. Just be distant of other people.”

The article provided fodder for a New York Times article: “Amid Signs of a Covid Uptick, Researchers Brace for the ‘New Normal.’”

Over on MSNBC, medical contributor Dr. Kavita Patel called for masking, despite acknowledging that the U.S. isn’t “seeing anywhere near the dramatic rises that we saw in previous summers or previous years” and that a large part of the population has already “either been infected and vaccinated or both.”

“So, what I think people need to know is that, I would just keep people on alert that when you’re in those crowded spaces, think about the cough and the colds, and sometimes many people don’t even have any symptoms,” Patel said.

“A mask can be your best friend,” she added. “Keep it — back in time, we had them in our office, in our coats, and our backpacks. Time to bring them out again. Especially as the fall season starts. We don’t want to see kids missing school for things that we could have prevented.”

The anachronous advice comes despite a scientific review in February of 78 randomized trials studying the effectiveness of physical interventions in lessening the spread of respiratory viruses that found “little to no” evidence that large-scale masking efforts were effective at preventing the spread of Covid-19.

The review, published by Cochrane Library, found that the difference between wearing a regular surgical mask or not wearing a mask at all “may make little to no difference in how many people caught a flu-like illness/COVID-like illness.” It also “probably makes little or no difference in how many people have flu/COVID confirmed by a laboratory test.”

Some experts pushed back against the review’s conclusion, suggesting the analysis overlooks the individual benefits of wearing masks, rather than community-wide benefits.

Headline Fail of the Week

Politico Playbook offered an odd defense of Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday: “Harris fights her biggest foe: Washington’s view of her.”

Harris’s “political future, and quite possibly the success of the Democratic ticket in 2024, hinges on a simple question: In modern-day D.C., is it possible to make a second impression?” the newsletter says.

It goes on to say that insiders close to Harris claim she has finally “hit her stride.”

“In recent public appearances, she’s often unscripted and seemingly at ease — no notes or teleprompter in sight. All eyes are on her, and she seems … comfortable,” the newsletter says, seemingly trying to contrast her recent appearances against the long lists of gaffes and word salads Harris has proffered since entering office.

The insiders “privately admit that her first year and a half was a bit rocky.”

“There are any number of factors they blame for this: Covid, Dems’ slim Senate majority (which kept her here in Washington), being assigned a political portfolio that didn’t mesh well with her background or strengths, and so on,” the newsletter adds.

White House chief of staff Jeff Zients told the outlet: “It’s always been true that there’s a delta between how people in D.C. view her, versus when she’s out doing her thing in the country with the American people. I think D.C. is starting to catch up … I would argue she’s been great throughout, but as she’s really mastered the demands of the job and been through so much already, that experience enables her to perform at an even higher level.”

Given the state of Harris’s polling, it’s unclear exactly where in the country Zients is referring to.

Media Misses

-Coverage of the 2024 GOP primary on ABC, NBC, and CBS has been overwhelmingly negative and largely failed to include any reporting on policy issues, according to a new study from the Media Research Center. Out of 820 minutes of airtime, just eleven minutes were focused on abortion, eight were focused on illegal immigration, six were for the Ukraine war, and three were for gun rights. The economy and inflation received just seconds of airtime. Ninety percent of the networks’ coverage of former president Trump was negative, as was 78 percent of the reporting on Florida governor Ron DeSantis and 57 percent for former Vice President Mike Pence.

–New York Times columnist David Brooks wants Democrats to know they are actually “extremely lucky” to have President Biden as their candidate and they should actually be more “grateful.” “[A]ny time you look at some alternative, whether it’s the mystery moderate from the Midwest or Gavin Newsom or anybody else, things start unraveling really fast. And so the Democrats are lucky, frankly, to have a candidate in Biden who has presided over an incredibly strong economic recovery, who has presided over pretty good international peacemaking efforts, both in Asia this week and also in Europe, and who I believe whose numbers will go up as inflation recedes, as it is,” Brooks said, before adding that Biden is “not a member of what you would call the coastal elite” and that he also “sends off all the right cultural messages for moderate independent voters who don’t have college degrees.”

-A Fox News anchor made what appeared to be a distasteful joke about tropical storm Hilary entering the U.S. from Mexico: “They let it right into the country because it’s Joe Biden’s America.”