For essentially the entire span of the COVID-19 pandemic, the fight over masking to “prevent the spread” has been at the forefront. Even more so than vaccines, where you see more diverse support across the political spectrum, nothing draws quite the dividing line as stark as mask mandates.

I think the reason for that is that the data is so clearly in the favor of one side, and we’ll get into that. But first, let’s hear from Leana Wen, one of the country’s foremost COVID tyrants, as she tells people that cloth masks are “little more than facial decorations.” And when you watch this, note that she has previously supported a national mask mandate.

Whoops pic.twitter.com/rJ9fV4hlJ4

— Eli Klein (@TheEliKlein) December 21, 2021

The game here is going to be to pretend that there’s been some massive shift in mask efficacy with Omicron now spreading. But that’s never been what the data has shown. As RedState has chronicled via numerous data sources repeatedly over the last two years, there is no real-world correlation between mask mandates and the spread of the coronavirus. That was true during the Alpha wave, it was true during the Delta wave, and per Wen’s admission, it remains true during the Omicron wave.

Heck, there’s been so much misinformation around mask-wearing that the CDC recently got caught pushing a completely ridiculous study claiming masks were highly effective in schools.

Of course, Wen is not making her statement out of some realization that she’s been wrong all along. Rather, she’s going to use the reality that cloth masks are ineffective to push more stringent restrictions. In fact, she’s previously stumped for a national vaccine mandate. You can also expect her to push for everyone to start wearing N95s.

The question should be this: Why should anyone trust anything this woman has to say after she was proven so wrong about cloth masks? The answer is that you shouldn’t. She’s on CNN constantly not because she’s credible, but because she pushes the narrative that liberals want to hear. It didn’t matter to Wen that we’ve had data from countries all over the world showing peak case rates despite having universal mask mandates. Only when it became convenient as an effort to push even more strict mitigation, was she willing to state the obvious about cloth masks.

The answer remains the same: Do not comply.