The Biden administration suspended enforcement of its mask mandate for airports, planes and other forms of travel today after a judge said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention overstepped its authority. The New York Post has more.
U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, an appointee of President Donald Trump, ruled that the CDC failed to properly explain its decision to impose the mandate or follow proper rulemaking procedures.
The Biden administration on Monday evening confirmed that travelers can ditch their masks pending a review of the ruling.
“The agencies are reviewing the decision and assessing potential next steps. In the meantime, today’s court decision means CDC’s public transportation masking order is not in effect at this time,” an administration official said.
“Therefore, TSA will not enforce its Security Directives and Emergency Amendment requiring mask use on public transportation and transportation hubs at this time. CDC recommends that people continue to wear masks in indoor public transportation settings.”
“Because ‘our system does not permit agencies to act unlawfully even in the pursuit of desirable ends,’ the court declares unlawful and vacates the mask mandate,” Mizelle wrote in her decision.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki called the ruling “disappointing”, but said the administration had not made up its mind about whether to appeal.
“The CDC continues recommending wearing a mask on public transit,” Psaki said.
“This just came out this afternoon, so right now, the Department of Homeland Security, who would be implementing [the change], and the CDC are reviewing the decision and of course the Department of Justice would make any determinations about litigation.”
Psaki added, “We would say to anyone sitting out there, ‘We’d recommend to wear masks on the airplane.’”
Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy pressed Psaki to explain why masks on mass transit make sense when people haven’t had to wear masks at most indoor venues, including the White House briefing room, for nearly two months.
“This is based on health considerations and data that the CDC looks at about transmissibility, as we’ve seen an increase in cases on airplanes,” Psaki replied.
Mizelle’s decision was in response to a July lawsuit filed by the nonprofit Health Freedom Defense Fund on behalf of two women who claimed that wearing masks on airplanes triggered or exacerbated anxiety and panic attacks.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: John Tierney has written an excellent piece for City Journal which looks at a couple of graphs, one comparing rates of Covid infection in the 11 US states that didn’t enforce mask mandates with the 39 that did, the other comparing the rate of infection in Germany, where 80% of the population wore masks, with Sweden, where only 10% of the population did. The graphs tell the story.
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When trapped between an ant on one side and a crocodile on the other, you’d better know which bites the hardest and run towards the ant. Right now, many are fleeing the ant towards the crocodile. These are lost. Some are even forcing others to flee towards the crocodile. These must all, without exception, be fed to it.
Why does the CDC (which is in bed with big pharma) recommend mask wearing anyway? I mean, what actual statistics do they point to that suggest that this might actually make a difference? Because I haven’t seen them. I still say masking is a filthy habit, and terrible for the environment (and it is as if that Cornish council that recommended wearing them on the beach recently was determined to ensure an increase in marine plastic pollution).
The enforced wearing of “masks” is akin to the Sumptuary Laws of Tudor and other eras. In one regard, it operates to enforce perceptions and distinctions of class, position, healthiness and obedience to one’s “betters”, as did the old laws. However, on the original Sumptuary aims of prohibiting excessive expenditure on apparel, it fails in two ways. Firstly, the monetary costs have been enormous, and secondly, as you point out, these things have vastly increased pollution in all the oceans, with plastic mask gyres in all the seven seas, and the consequent costs of cleaning them up; if indeed it’s possible to do that.
They are disgusting in every respect, and, where I live, are now rivalling the plastic bags of canine excrement, filled and lobbed into the hedgerows and verges, or left on beaches.
See Ivor Cummins recent review of his opinions and predictions for the progress of covid from September 2020. Very informative, including about the mask nonsense.
https://odysee.com/@IvorCummins:f/20220416-Crucial-Viral-Update-Revisited-Checklist-Final:9
Oh no. This is terrible. Taking those masks off will unleash the mother of all plagues. Corpses will be piling up as a result of this Neanderthal judgement.
Did we ever actually see bodies piling up in the streets of Oldham, Bolton, Leicester and all those other places? Did bodies actually pile up anywhere (apart from in those care homes that stopped caring for people)?
Sarcasm Tom? Just checking.
The article quotes, again, non existent evidence. This time rise in “cases” linked to planes. It’s all in the unpublished data folks.
I’d like to know what the evidence is on planes. I know someone who apparently believes that Easyjet has had a problem. Is there any evidence for this?
As with other “settings”, it’s hard to prove causality on aircraft transmission. Firstly, you’d have to countdown-test passengers and crew several times before the flight. Apart from possible false negatives, people could be infected at several points before boarding (travel to terminal, terminal check-in etc.). After the flight, plenty of follow up checks would be necessary, and the same opportunities exist to pick it up from other than the flight.
Without procedures like these, Psaki’s and others’ assertions are nonsense, unverifiable and PR nudging.
Even if there was an increase in cases associated with air travel (as suggested in one of the quotes in the article), it wouldn’t prove that it was due to airborne transmission — it could be surface-hand transmission at the airport or in the plane. There’s just too much faith in it being a purely respiratory-transmission disease and that face masks can help via some sort of magic.
97% of “positive” PCR tests are false positives based on deliberately ramped up distorted amplification cycles ( from 25 to 45) – just a reminder.
Surface transmission has been debunked.
it’s an airborne respiratory disease.
initially they where not allowed to say it was airborne as that apparently has special meaning in hospitals requiring specific ppe which they didn’t have.
but it is an airborne respiratory virus that causes disease like flu.
the fact that they tied themselves in knots to try and describe this thing not using the correct nomenclature because they didn’t want to set off global established protocols on dealing with exactly these things just shows how deceitful they’ve been all along.
Psaki doesn’t need “evidence” for the lies she spouts daily.
Australia’s political leaders were found curled beneath their desks and whimpering for their mummies. That is to say, they declined to comment.
Surely that should read “stone” not “desk”?
Good point!
Who do you mean by “leaders”?
Another good point. They confuse leadership with successful bullying: I ordered people to wear masks and look, lots of them are doing it!
Leadership is easy: you just threaten fines, imprisonment and loss of employment for the plebs, while toadying to those with more power (like media barons, etc).
It’s almost like some agency is saying everyone needs to catch this variant so drop all mandates.
these judgements could have been made anytime and no doubt previous attempts at getting them scrapped all failed for spurious reasons, they’ve only now succeeded because the authorities wanted them to. A cynical view but certainly fits the evidence.
I’m not following you. Are you saying that masks and other NPIs reduce infection and that is why they want to drop them??? The graphs above (as well as every serious randomly controlled study) would say otherwise.
My cynical view is that masks are highly effective at terrorising inadequately cynical populations into thinking there is a deadly plague.
They are keeping the masks ticking along ready for their next scamdemic and the re-introduction of mask mandates, ‘vax’ mandates backed by the planned Gates/ WHO directive and Chinese style Lockdowns.
We are living under a constant threat.
I’m unsurprised but nonetheless saddened by the number of my acquaintance who are still under the spell of ‘the mask’. That most of them have had covid, despite the jabs and the masks, and that it has passed me by (unmasked and unjabbed) still singles me out as a risk-seeking maverick in their eyes.
I don’t think they’re in the least interested in science or facts, they just want some sort of security blanket, so they can tell themselves they ‘did their bit’.
Here in little old South Australia where they have (finally) dropped the mask mandate in many situations, reckon 50% still wearing. Including the chemist I went into maskless to be told they were part of the health service therefore masks required. I said – no you’re not, you are a a shop in the high street, and the blue masks you are wearing don’t work – and if you had any degree of medical competence you’d know this. Won’t be back – but doctors rooms, blood services are often just as stupid. Lord help us
I gave a similar response in my dentist a couple of weeks ago. When I declined the offer of a mask claiming they were no longer required, I was told they are still required by the NHS. I replied “This a BUPA-run facility” and continued my stroll to the waiting area.
Does you dentist propose drilling holes in your mask to get to your teeth?
It would be either that or trepanning, if the mask stayed in place…
Marvellous
I’ll remind my own dentist practice on my next appointment that I am a private paying patient. It’s still bedwetter central there.
It’s even more pathetic in Germany. Mask mandates have been dropped in most places come April. And the majority of sheep still stumble around masked. Worse yet, some universities now illegally introduced the mask mandates using their own house rules. Apparently nobody is bothered by it.
Don’t wish to be offensive, rayc – but Germans are supposed to be orderly and inclined to obedience: Befehl ist Befehl!
Australians (even in South Australia, which was never a penal colony) are supposed to be defiant individualists. The muzzling here is rampant.
But there is no more “Befehl” currently, and they are still acting as if there was. They have been successfully converted into True Believers. They now follow the covidian rituals as a matter of moral conviction. Because they imagine that it makes them Good People as opposed to the Evil People who refuse masking. There is even a special German word for such holier-than-thou individuals – “Gutmenschen”. Our “health” minister is a crazy individual who reinforces such beliefs at every occasion.
Lauterbach is a guy who studied health policy and management in the USA and he’s basically the top-level German subordinate to the international public health bureaucracy. An rolling back of corona measures so far happened despite the WHO opposed it.
The fact that medical personnel, to whom we entrust our welfare while under anaesthetic, are prepared to believe this waffle without seeing any evidence to confirm that masks are any use, is somewhat worrying.
Hi, fellow South Aussie. Yes, the masked morons still number around 50% in my neck of the SA woods.
And why on earth are they still required in “health care settings” and public transport but not required in shops and supermarkets and malls where people can spend far more time breathing in aerosols than in a quick in-and-out to a dentist or GP or hearing service or optometrist.
Stupid pandemic theatre, the lot of it.
And any medical professional who goes along with the anti-scientific mask thing has forfeited any credibility, especially if they are trying to foist unnecessary and possibly hazardous procedures or drugs on you.
What is most concerning, is that the evidence masks don’t work, that lockups do not work and that the jab doesn’t work has been easily available to anyone with the mind to look, yet despite the fact that even if you ignore the human rights act and Nuremberg code that prevent their use, the government still had to apply the precautionary principle which says that GOVERNMENT must not act unless it has the evidence to support its actions.
In other words, government could not impose actions that affected everyone’s life, unless it had the evidence on its side to back that … and even if the best evidence had been the view of experts who were wrong, that bad opinion was very rapidly overtaken by the actual evidence from Sweden. Yet two years later, instead of the precautionary approach requiring government to prove its actions are justified, we are still in the alice in wonderland world where ordinary people have to prove government were wrong … and worse still … to force a court to actually hear the evidence rather than dismissing cases out of hand before hearing anything and so refusing to hear the evidence.
Anyone who wonders how Nazi Germany started killing the Jews … now knows the answer. It was government officials who refused to respect the rights of individuals, judges who refused to uphold the law, and a public who was conned by a bombardment of propaganda and lies creating a totalitarian state that cared nothing at all for individual rights, etc.
It depresses me that people here continue to cite the Nuremberg code as though it has any force in law.
It’s not a law, and no court enforces it. It is, quite literally, guidelines. Some signatories adopted some parts of it in law, or in professional standards.
That’s as far as it goes. It’s not holy writ.
Nevertheless, it should be a strong driver of how politicians behave (as if!).
After the last two years? Dream on!
Your statement is legally correct but misleading.
Most countries, including the USA and UK, enshrine all of the Declaration of Helsinki and the Nuremberg Code into local laws.
I can’t think of any detail of either ethical framework that isn’t law in the UK (and most aspects are treated very seriously and will probably result in a custodial sentence if broken). Note that the obligation to follow the law rests on the individual, not the institution, but note that blame can run rather high up a managerial structure. Having worked in this field it was the senior management that were most scared by these rules, which led to much paranoia and internal audits — as it should be.
Our laws in this regard go far beyond the Nuremberg Code, but that’s a nuance in terms of your statement.
Which detail that prevents the imposition of muzzles is enshrined in “UK” law?
The Gates/ WHO power grab is design to take it down for good to impose Gates’ World Vax Plan !
Johnson has signed us up !
Johnson’s “Bill of Rights” (sic) will allow him to over-ride bodily autonomy on the basis of the “greater good” and the “public interest”.
So it is a coup d’etat then (and a betrayal of those who voted for this government way back in 2019).
Look at he proposals and make up your own mind.
Nothing good for humanity ever comes from the Gates direction.
( Who was it suggested a “15% reduction in Global population by use of vaccines and Health Care”?)
Yes, it is dreadfully saddening to discover how little resistance to propaganda exists in the general population.
When you look a the stuff they read and watch, their inability to apply critical thinking or research anything for themselves together with their total life dependency on ‘Netflix,’ the BBC, SKY their mobiles and their aps it is really no surprise.
They are totally wide open to it all
Tyrants who control the Media and the forces of Order do not need ‘evidence’ and principles – especially when what they are doing has nothing whatever to do with public heath …in fact the opposite.
By my calculations, that took 10 months to temporarily pause the tyranny, pending the inevitable appeal.
There will be no consequences for the despots that imposed it, and no deterrence to them re-imposing it in future using a slightly rephrased version of The Science.
None of this ends until Fauci gets Epsteined.
Hmm – I rather like your new verb at the end there! (Also the idea)
Yes – a corker of a sentence, Rogerborg!
Fauci is just the first domino …but the problem is that he has so many ‘powerful friends’ who would also be brought down and for whom he takes the flak.
Thus the belief that his fall, when it comes, will be down a very long flight of stairs.
Let’s hope so. Very soon
I’d rather see Gates go, before I’d worry about Fauci. I think the US system may well see off ‘America’s Doctor’. It’ll take more to sink Uncle Bill Gates.
Oh I don’t know. I think there is some president in “American” history of pushback when people’s rights are infringed. History may not repeat, but it often rhymes.
Fauci has to go. Sadly ge will never be brought to book
The anti-Trump brigade will see that this is overturned in no time.
Yet another triumph following Trump’s time in office. (Oh and just in case anyone thinks this might be sarcasm, I am of course serious!).
I’m surprised they keep pushing these mandates — eventually someone will ask for objective evidence for the policy, and the hand-waving won’t work.
If they let them die quietly there’s more chance than people will forget about them and there’ll be no need to show that they continued with these damaging policies even though supportive evidence kept on not appearing despite their efforts.
I’m surprised they keep pushing these mandates — eventually someone will ask for objective evidence for the policy, and the hand-waving won’t work.
I’m surprised that people keep being forced to change their clocks twice a year — eventually, someone will ask for objective evidence for the policy.
This mirrors the mask situation exactly. On the outset, the idea seems patently absurd, yet, some people are very much convinced that this simply must have a positive effect. And they can produce a century’s worth of accumulated statistical convenience correlations (ie, gather a new statistic whenever numbers happen to be suitable) to support their superstition.
This method can be used to prove pretty much anything, given enough time.
Yes, and if they don’t change the clocks twice a year, rather than going back to the pre war GMT, they will have to make it permanently the “wrong” time (BST) because people can’t simply decide to start an hour earlier without someone telling them that 8am is actually 9am.
Some of us are old enough to remember the 1968 -71 trial of using GMT+1 all round the year. There still seems to be a lot of argument of it now, if you search for “experimental bst all the year round”.
The objective evidence is that we are on a longitude that makes GMT most appropriate for the UK in winter (the clue is that midday is when the sun is at its highest). BST works in summer because the daylight hours are so long it doesn’t particularly matter what you define as midday.
Virtually everyone complaining about the clocks changing lives in the south and often southeast. BST would be intolerable in winter for a large proportion of the population.
Why not have GMT all year round?
GMT is the so-called local time for the British isles, ie, the time zone of the UK. That’s based on a principally arbitrary definition of time zones depending on the longitude and the European convention of counting hours from midnight to midnight (other conventions have been used in other parts of the world in the past). It’s not evidence of anyhing and unrelated to my text.
The idea of so-called daylight saving time is about 100 years old and was introduced because some people convinced some other people that it simply must be beneficial and not just a pointless bi-annual nuisance. But in the end, minus the nuisance, it doesn’t really matter if start of the day according to the clock is shifted by an hour in one or another direction.
The lockdowns would provide an example. They all began after the numbers had started to fall – but, hey presto! – the numbers went down further, ergo lockdowns work.
This is the view of almost everyone I’ve spoken to on that particular matter.
At least catlle have the excuse that they can’t read the word ‘abattoir’ as they file in.
The problem appears to be that they have convinced themselves that the evidence is there, based on somewhat questionable studies that were conducted.
However, the real problem is not lack of evidence, is lack of cost/benefit analysis. It is plain to see that mask mandates have horrible political costs causing endless bickering and strife, even lives lost when some mentally unstable mask opponents flip out and start shooting around. Meanwhile any “protection” they offer needs to be sought and proved using sophisticated statistical methods – it is so negligible that you need a powerful microscope to find it. Of course, if the protection effect was worthwhile, you would see it in the simplest comparisons like those pandemic trajectory charts, but it does not seem to bother the advocates a single bit, presumably because they assign some sort of infinite benefit to “safety” and “saving lives”.
One could make a similar argument for the “power of prayer” – given enough studies I’m sure you would find a beneficial effect for at least some people. By analogy the mask advocates should mandate daily prayer (using their favorite religion no less) to everyone, based on the scientific evidence which speaks in favor of it, completely ignoring stress, aggression and revolt induced by such mandate in other significantly sized groups of people.
To make the analogy even more absurd, as a nudist I could find some studies that prove that not wearing clothes during warm weather is beneficial to the mood and skin and then jump to mandating public nudity for everyone.
So the right question to ask is not whether masks work or not, the question is WHY are all the hugely negative side effects (of the mandates, not so much of masks themselves) ignored?
Masks: Total lies to enforce ovine compliance and destroy any hint of rational thinking in the sheep. Worked very well!
Next: jump off the cliff to beat Covid (target: 60% compliance?)
Psaki is a very special example of the straight/hard faced liar without conscience – sadly an increasingly more common 21st century sub-species.
Yet another example of the fetid depths humans will stoop to for money and ‘position’.
I think the lack of conscience matters more than her demeanour.
Like a transgender Boris.
Who decided that someone who looked like Rosa Klebb would be just the type to inspire confidence?
“This is based on health considerations and data that the CDC looks at about transmissibility, as we’ve seen an increase in cases on airplanes,” Psaki replied.
So masks on planes don’t work then.
It’s worse, actually: Airplanes are not something like people landfills, where they get dumped in order to remain inside forever. An increases of cases of a communicable disease on airplanes which doesn’t translate to an increase of cases somewhere else as well cannot happen: Whoever made this statement isn’t even concerned with coming up with credible lies anymore, it’s just Masks must be prescribed because masks must be prescribed! The CDC (and other so-called public health authorities) will order people to wear masks in every situation or location where this hasn’t been prohibited already, entirely as an end in itself.
In stop press it says the second graph compares rate of infection but on the chart it says deaths per 100k.
I think we have to keep trying to show this sort of data to people who never got the memo even though it seems fruitless. If we don’t, then they will continue on into the future thinking they were right and next time will go along with it even more willingly.
The government are regrouping, so should we, the warriors of truth and actual science!
There is a global Covid summit in May during which no doubt more coordinated restrictions will be arranged for the near future.
This stuff will be with us until sufficient people twig that relying on MSM for their ‘news’ may be informative, but not in a good way.
On the subject of flights and restrictions, does anyone recall the “outbreak of the SA variant” in the Netherlands?
At the time nobody could enter the country without being jabbed up, tested and masked.
So yet again, what evidence do they have, which is obviously too complicated for the great unwashed (you and me) to understand, that would explain this phenomenon?
Simple answer is….. They don’t and they know full well it is just theatre for the gullible.
Please stop it with the graphs and evidence that masks are not effective.
We know!
None of this past two years has been about logic, reason, evidence from observation.
Dear President Putin:
If I send you a target list…
Yours
Very Fed Up.
Evidence, facts and reality are irrelevant, the Government has their narrative and that is that.
Seeing passengers cheering the announcement of mask mandates being lifted suggests to me that people calling out for them are mainly people who don’t actually fly that often.
Likewise with a lot of restrictions. Those calling for pubs or playgrounds to be closed were never really people likely to use them.
Recently it has been found that vaccinated people are producing spike proteins even after more than 1 year. Spike proteins are found in lymph nodes of vaccinated people that has died. These spike proteins are causing blood clotting. Because every cell dna is changed by messenger rna vaccine, spike proteins will always be produced in every cell of the body. I don’t want to scare any vaccinated friends here but the blood clotting risk is continuous. You need to detox yourself and boost your immune system in order to fight with these unnatural proteins. Ivermectin blocks ACE2 receptors to bind with spike proteins and helps to detox your body. Get it before it is too late https://www.livingnatural.net
“You need to detox yourself”….. mumbo jumbo.
“Ivermectin helps to detox your body. Get it before it is too late”…. or why not get yourself round to Holland & Barrett for some ginger and herbal tea?
“Recently it has been found”… by whom?
“I don’t want to scare any vaccinated friends here” – yes you do, you want to scare them into ordering Ivermectin – are you on a commission?
I’ve heard that pine needle tea helps protect against spike protein shed. I’ll guarantee though that you won’t hear much about it even if true as the commission is not high enough.
Anyway, isn’t project fear de rigueur these days?
So does dandelion. Or so ‘they’ say.
Globalnews.ca reported, one day ago:
The requirement for those arriving in Canada to wear a mask for 14 days also does not differentiate between indoor and outdoor spaces.
That’s those arriving in the country from ANYWHERE in the world. Even having popped across the border for a night out in the neighbouring US state.
”Whether you’ve toured the globe or stopped in the United States to fill up the gas tank, when you return to Canada, you must wear a face mask in public for 14 days…”
A nut job, Trudeau. And vile.
I read yesterday, I think it was here, about this judgement, and then it was mentioned the injection mandate for federal employees was upheld by a different court? I haven’t searched for this on any news site, but no-one mentions that. Has anyone else read that?