The disastrous public health 'experts'
When it comes to pandemic messaging, the feds are their own worst enemy.
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Congress should’ve set aside some of the $5.3 trillion it approved last year to fight COVID-19 to hire some marketing interns to head the federal government’s pandemic messaging campaign.
Anything would be better than the team of monkeys running it now.
President Joe Biden, who is fully vaccinated, wears a mask practically everywhere he goes. He wears it when he is outdoors. He wears it when he is flanked by vaccinated White House staffers. He wears it when he is more than six feet away from the nearest person. He even wore his mask when he met remotely with world leaders. (Humorously enough, Biden declined to wear his mask last week when he posed for a photo with former President Jimmy Carter, 96, and former first lady Rosalynn Carter, 93, both of whom were likewise unmasked).
Asked this weekend why the president insists on wearing a mask in situations that don’t call for it, White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients answered, "I think everyone is tired and wearing a mask can be a pain, but we're getting there. The light at the end of the tunnel is brighter and brighter."
He added, “The CDC guidance across time will allow vaccinated people more and more privileges to take off that mask.”
“More privileges.”
Oh, may we?
There is nothing wrong with setting an example or even dangling a carrot to encourage the public to act accordingly, especially considering the rate of vaccinations in the United States has slowed considerably in the past few weeks. But there’s a right way to address the public and a wrong way. Zients’s way is the wrong way.
It’s patronizing, tone-deaf, and it smacks of authoritarianism. It’s also a surefire way to get people to tune out the federal government’s messaging on the pandemic. No one appreciates being addressed as if they are a vassal to some benevolent overlord. They especially don't appreciate being belittled by officials who are as inconsistent as they are paternalistic.
Sadly, Zients’s remarks are exactly in line with how public officials have carried themselves throughout this pandemic. Indeed, when they’re not busy issuing arbitrary pandemic protocols dictating everyday life or walking back off-the-cuff remarks and hair-brained predictions, they’re busy talking down to the public, all the while diminishing trust in institutions created specifically to deal with things such as the COVID-19 outbreak. It’s as if these people have no idea how to address an audience, let alone contain a once-in-a-generation viral outbreak.
And they wonder why people question the health care “experts."
Insofar as those who’ve damaged trust in public health officials are concerned, none are so accomplished as White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, a miserable little rat person who has flip-flopped more in the last year than most politicians do in their entire careers.
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