Originally posted by bigtisme
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-face-mask-protection-vaccine-cdc-director/
idk this was the first one that popped up on google. I'm sure you can find more than one person who said it. This was said all last fall...As you mentioned, that was from last fall, September 2020 to be specific. The quote was from the CDC director at the time: "I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine, because it may be 70%. And if I don't get an immune response, the vaccine is not going to protect me. This face mask will."
Notice the key words there: "might" and "if." I don't think you're accurately portraying his quote. He was talking about masks in comparison to a then-hypothetical vaccine that might only be 70% effective. The actual vaccines that are available now are much more effective than that against the main strains of COVID-19, though the jury is still out on their effectiveness against the newer mutated strains.
Originally posted by bigtisme
Weeks?? They're talking at least thru the end of 2022 now. If you tell me that we can stop wearing masks a month after the vaccine is publicly available I'd at least listen, but literally no one is talking like that.You cut off the part where I mentioned the COVID-19 variants that might be resistant to the vaccine. If one of those variants becomes the dominant strain and it turns out to be resistant to the vaccine, then yes, masks will still be necessary despite the vaccine.
Originally posted by bigtisme
I wear one every day....I have for nearly a year. So has 90+% of the country. But the people dragging this out aren't the ones against mask mandates lol.90+% of the country is not wearing a mask. Where I live, there are several small cities clustered together, and one of those cities has mandated mask-wearing in public enclosed spaces, though they really don't do anything to enforce it. In that city, about 70% of people wear masks in stores and other similar places. In the other cities nearby where mask use is not mandated, it's more like 50%, and my wife recently walked into and then out of a grocery story where only about 30% of the customers were wearing masks. At my day job -- where we just had an employee catch COVID-19 and nearly passed it on to me before he spent three weeks sick at home, by the way -- maybe 20% of the employees wear masks, much to my frustration. At my night job, mask usage is closer to 80% among the employees, but maybe 20% among the customers.
So, yeah, no, it's not 90% of the country wearing a mask. If it was, the death toll would be a lot lower right now.
That said, I'm
very glad to hear you wear a mask, bigtisme. And I appreciate your skeptic's eye on this issue, because as I said before, I've seen a lot of dumb things said by people on both sides of this issue. Just remember to be consistent in your skepticism -- if you're only aiming it at one side of a debate, that's not actually skepticism.
