Several state leaders of both parties support the requirement, citing science. The president says people need to “have a certain freedom.”
The nation’s top public health agency argued in a medical journal last week that Americans need clear, consistent messaging to normalize wearing cloth face coverings to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
American political leaders apparently still haven’t gotten the message.
President Donald Trump said in an interview that aired Sunday that he didn’t support a national mandate for people to wear masks because “I want people to have a certain freedom,” even as a bipartisan group of governors emphasized the role masks play in slowing the virus and saving lives in their states.
“And I don’t agree with the statement that if everybody wears a mask, everything disappears,” the president told Fox News host Chris Wallace in the interview, undercutting the messaging from his own government experts.
Several months into a global pandemic that has infected 3.7 million Americans and killed more than 140,000 people in the U. S., the nation still lacks a unified approach to handling Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, including the use of face coverings.
Cities, counties and states are taking their own approaches to dealing with the resurgent virus that has ravaged states across the South and West at a record-setting pace in recent weeks. Indeed, the lack of a clear strategy is playing out as both the entire nation and individual states set records on positive coronavirus cases and deaths amid pressure to fully reopen the economy ahead of the November election.
Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters on Monday that “we could drive this epidemic to the ground” if everyone wore a face covering the next four to six weeks. In aneditorial published in the medical journal JAMA on Tuesday, Redfield and other CDC officials cited case studies affirming the effectiveness of face coverings.
“[T]he public needs consistent, clear, and appealing messaging that normalizes community masking,” they wrote. “At this critical juncture when COVID-19 is resurging, broad adoption of cloth face coverings is a civic duty, a small sacrifice reliant on a highly effective low-tech solution that can help turn the tide favorably in national and global efforts against COVID-19.”
Trump, however, has provided inconsistent, mixed messaging on masks. The president called out Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams for recommending against the use of masks before the CDC recommended them in April.
“Everybody who is saying don’t wear a mask — all of a sudden everybody’s got to wear a mask, and as you know, masks cause problems, too,” Trump said in the Fox News interview, which was recorded on Friday at the White House. “With that being said, I’m a believer in masks. I think masks are good. But I leave it up to the governors.
