CBS' Gayle King: 'I still feel judged' in New York, get 'side-eye' for not wearing mask outdoors

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Media top headlines May 13

CNN boss Jeff Zucker defending his anchors becoming more ‘opinionated’ and ‘emotional’ round out today’s top media headlines

"CBS This Morning" anchor Gayle King revealed Thursday she receives judgmental looks and "side-eye" for not wearing a mask outdoors in New York.

King told Dr. Anthony Fauci that she stopped a woman in New York City, who like King was vaccinated, but was still wearing a mask outside.

"I think we all either feel guilty or we feel it's not time, or we see everybody else doing it," she said. "It's monkey-see, monkey-do. Do you really think it's OK? Because I still feel judged. I feel people giving you the side-eye. It's not comfortable, Dr. Fauci."

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"If you were vaccinated, you don’t have to wear a mask outside," Fauci said. "It would be a very unusual situation if you were going into a completely crowded situation where people are essentially falling all over each other. Then you wear a mask. But any other time, if you are vaccinated and you are outside, put aside your mask, you don’t have to wear it." 

"People are still judging," King said.

The Atlantic recently profiled liberal enclaves rejecting scientific research on outdoor transmission and mask-wearing, to the point of paranoid practices that experts fear is undermining vaccine confidence.

Fauci, the White House’s chief medical advisor, made his comments days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was accused of exaggerating the risk of coronavirus transmission while outdoors. The New York Times reported that while the agency maintains the risk of transmission is less than 10 percent, the actual rate is lower than 1 percent.

The Biden administration has come under criticism for hyper-caution and mixed messaging on mask-wearing, particularly for fully vaccinated persons. President Biden, in spite of being fully vaccinated for months, has been seen wearing masks outside and even on Zoom calls with other world leaders. Fauci said he wouldn’t travel or dine out at restaurants in spite of being fully vaccinated, and he's also taken criticism for continuing to call for children playing outside to wear masks.

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King, a Democratic donor who has vacationed with Barack and Michelle Obama, finished her questioning by asking Fauci, "does your body tense up" during his recent testy exchanges with Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. Her co-anchors chuckled.

"I just don’t want to get into that tit for tat," Fauci said. "I just don’t understand what the problem is with him. I’m just going to do my job and he can do what he wants to do and we’ll see what happens." 

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Fauci grew frustrated with Paul Tuesday for charging that the National Institutes of Health have funded risky "gain-of-function" research at the Wuhan Institute for Virology, which some experts believe may have been the source of the novel coronavirus that has ravaged the globe. That possibility was initially dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory by mainstream media outlets.

Fox News' Alexandra Hein contributed to this report.