Tucker Carlson: Leaders need to explain their COVID mandates, not just tell us to obey

Kate Brown first became governor of Oregon way back in 2015. At the time, there was not a whole lot going on in Oregon, so voters didn't ask many questions. The one thing they did learn about Kate Brown over and over again is that she is a self-described bisexual. Why is this relevant? Well, the media didn't explain. They told us, without exactly explaining what it meant, that this fact was historic and it was highly thrilling. Kate Brown’s sex life was shattering ceilings. Woohoo! 

And yet, if you looked a little closer, you noticed something a little weird, actually, Kate Brown was married to a man. Yes, he had a different last name, but he was still, as they say on TikTok, binary. He was a dude. That's fine, of course. But it was also a little confusing. How does having a groom at her wedding make Kate Brown an official member of the LGBTQ exclamation point community? No one bothered to ask. That kind of curiosity was forbidden. It was like wondering why we don't call Barack Obama half White, which he is. It's not allowed. Stop with the questions. Celebrate. 

So voters in Oregon dutifully celebrated. And then out from under them, the world changed. Suddenly, things in America went from placid to highly turbulent. That was especially true in Oregon, where there was rioting by left-wing militia that went on for more than a year. The state's biggest city was destroyed. People died. And then a virus arrived from China and it killed thousands. It was a very serious moment. 

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Unfortunately, Oregon did not have a very serious leader. It had some dopey soccer mom who got elected because she claimed she had a girlfriend in college. Kate Brown, unfortunately, turned out to be lighter than air. She didn't know anything. She had no achievements. Under pressure, she wilted and became irrational. She was exactly the leader you do not want in a crisis. And yet she was the governor, which in the age of coronavirus made her very close to God. And she acted like it. Kate Brown commanded Oregonians to stop going outside without their little masks on, even if they've been vaccinated.

KATE BROWN: Today, I'm announcing that effective Friday, Aug. 27, masks will be required in all public outdoor settings or physical distancing is not possible regardless of vaccination status. … In addition, the Oregon Health Authority strongly recommends masking at outdoor gatherings at private residences where people from different households do not maintain physical distance.

At this point, it's almost pointless to apply the traditional measures of logic, reason and data to decrees like that one. She's bisexual. It's cool, the power-mad hypocrites who think these decrees up don’t care what the facts are. But since we are old-school that way, we will try it one last time. Kate Brown's decree is nonsensical. 

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First off, if the vaccines work, then why are vaccinated people required to wear masks? And for that matter, why is anyone required to wear a mask outdoors? Outdoor transmission of COVID is so rare that it's practically nonexistent. That is true whether or not you have been vaccinated. As Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at Harvard, pointed out this spring, "Outdoor masking has notable costs and really no evidence of benefits." And that remains true tonight. Even Tony Fauci ordinarily only tells the truth in private emails, admitted the same thing in public. "It's pretty common sense now that outdoor risk is really, really quite low," Fauci said. 

A recent study from Ireland, among others, confirms that this is true. Researchers there considered more than 230,000 COVID cases in Ireland through March of this year. What do they find? They found that only one in a thousand could be traced to outdoor transmission. 

So as a factual matter, Kate Brown's order is absurd. But even if you ignored the science, even if you convinced yourself that large numbers of people were catching COVID while jogging, you still wouldn't make people wear masks. Because drugstore masks, the kind that everyone wears, do not work. Cloth and surgical masks do not stop COVID. That's not a guess. We know. 

A new study from engineers at the University of Waterloo, for example, just came out this week, once again, proves that conclusively. The researchers used a mannequin to simulate someone seated in a large room. Some mannequins had common cloth masks. Others had the blue surgical mask that you see everywhere. What did they find? They found that aerosol droplets big enough to contain COVID built up on the mannequins as if the mask wasn't even there. The masks only filtered about 10% of the aerosol droplets, 90% got through. 

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So on every level, the order you just saw from Kate Brown is ridiculous. And yet, thanks to COVID, as we noted, she is now God, so her orders are now the law and if you ignore them, you will go to jail.

REPORTER: Do you want people calling the police on their neighbors? 

KATE BROWN: Look, this is no different than what happens if there's a party down the street and it's keeping everyone awake. What neighbors do, they call law enforcement because it's too noisy. 

REPORTER: That could be a yes. 

KATE BROWN: Yes, yes.

So you call the cops. Of course, you call the cops. None of the actual laws are being enforced, but the fake laws, not the ones passed by the legislature, the ones made up by the power-mad governor, will be enforced with guns. 

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This is happening all over the country. In California state, where identity is also more important than competence, one charter school just went into lockdown. Police swarmed the campus. Why? Was there a mass shooting, a terror incident? No. Two siblings came to school without masks, so they called the SWAT team.

REPORTER:  It was a tense first day in Springs Charter School in Temecula. Police were called on campus. The entire school went into lockdown and all because two students refused to wear a mask. … Victoria Nelson is a junior at the school and her brother Drew Nelson is a senior. The siblings say they chose not to wear a mask for religious reasons, believing it would be enough to exempt them from the mandate even though no one filed any request with the district or school. … Administrators say Victoria refused to wear a mask or leave class. That’s when we’re told the situation escalated. Listen to what the principal tells her. 

PRINCIPAL: I need you to stand up or we will have to physically remove you from this classroom. 

STUDENT: Please don’t touch me. 

REPORTER: Eventually deputies showed up. The entire school was placed on lockdown and both students were banned from going to that charter school ever again.

Oh, they can't go to school ever again, we're going to have the police beat you if you don't leave. That's what the principal just said. There's no evidence that the masks they're being told to wear will protect them, how many healthy school-age kids have died of COVID? Oh, sorry, that's actual science now no longer allowed. 

What's interesting is that as we call the cops on children and threaten to hurt them if they don't leave immediately and never get educated again, there are an awful lot of people who are actually dying of COVID. Thousands and thousands of elderly people have died of it in this country. No one seems to care about the actual deaths, particularly the deaths caused by the poor decision-making of Democratic governors – particularly in the state of New York. 

Today, we learned that Andrew Cuomo was lying about how many nursing home patients he killed in New York. It turns out the total number of COVID deaths in the state was about 12,000 more than he said it was – 12,000. Twelve thousand. It's not a small number. Why didn't we know that until today? Think about that. If they can lie about the number of people who died to the tune of 12,000 people – that's a huge problem. 

You can't make rational decisions about public health unless you have real numbers. How can you determine whether mandatory vaccinations are a good idea, for example, unless you have accurate numbers? But we don't have accurate numbers. Politicians are lying about them and have from day one. But nobody cares. 

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The Pentagon press secretary explained today that all American soldiers, young and healthy, virtually every one of them nevertheless must be vaccinated immediately, whether or not they want or need the shot. Now, this has been done before, the last time the Pentagon forced troops to take a vaccine, that was the anthrax vaccine during the Iraq war, it was a disaster. It led to serious side effects, including death. And the military had to abandon it. But don't worry, says John Kirby. Mandatory vaccines may not be necessary, but they're orders and those orders are lawful.

KIRBY: Once you mandate it, as we've done, it's a lawful order, it's a lawful order, and we fully anticipate that our troops are going to follow the orders. When you raise your right hand and you take that oath, that's what you agreed to do. 

Kind of missing the point, no? Shouldn't they be explaining to us slowly and in ways that we can understand because it is, after all, a democracy, why this is a good idea, showing us the data that justify this decision, explaining what the exemptions might be, telling us how long this is going to go on and what we're going to get out of it in the end? Because all of this is being done on our behalf for our benefit. Right? That's why the U.S. government exists, to help us. 

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They don't even mention any of that. His response was, we have the power to do this and we're going to. That's what Joe Biden just said, too. He just announced yesterday that everybody in America should be forced to take the vaccine and then an undetermined number of booster shots from now until forever, regardless of their age or their health status or their religious beliefs or whether critically they have active antibodies or not, whether they've had COVID already and recovered. It doesn't matter, your individual circumstances. One size fits 340 million Americans. That's the plan. So Biden just ordered private business to compel employees to get vaccinated:

JOE BIDEN: If you're a business leader, a nonprofit leader, state or local leader who has been waiting for full FDA approval to require vaccinations, I call on you now to do that, require it. Do what I did last month requiring employees to get vaccinated or face strict requirements.

So the guy who planned the withdrawal from Afghanistan is now in charge of our vaccine policy. Some people clearly should get vaccinated. They're at risk. The benefits outweigh the risks of the vaccine for them. Other people probably shouldn't. Not everybody is identical. 

But it doesn't matter. Because force is their only response. The CEO of Delta, Ed Bastian, just announced today he's going to be working as Biden's enforcer to make everybody do it. Bastion announced that unvaccinated Delta employees will be fined hundreds of dollars every month. "This surcharge will be necessary to address the financial risk the decision not to vaccinate is creating for our company," Bastian wrote. 

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Oh, but this only applies to COVID. notice there's no other illness, not Type two diabetes, not HIV, not hepatitis, all of those diseases are widespread, all cost a lot of money. But Delta isn't forcing anyone to address those just COVID because the president has commanded it. OK. 

Is this a good idea? Are the vaccines working in the way they promised they would? Again, it's not an argument against vaccines or even this one. It's an argument in favor of transparency and knowing what the data actually say before you obey. 

If you're interested, you should take a look at what's happening in Israel. Researchers there are giving us some answers to those questions. Keep in mind, Israel is one of the most vaccinated countries on the planet. More than 80% of Israeli citizens over the age of 12 are now fully vaccinated against COVID. So this summer, famously, Israel lifted its lockdowns because people weren't getting sick anymore. 

But now they are getting sick. Israel has one of the highest daily COVID infection rates in the entire world. It's averaging 7,500 confirmed cases a day. That's twice the number from just last week. What is going on here? There were nearly 10,000 cases diagnosed yesterday alone. Hundreds of people have died this month, vaccinated people. 

So what is that? Again, doesn't mean vaccines are bad, it means we need an explanation for what's going on. Why aren't we demanding one? There are signs that vaccines in this country, too, are not working in the way we were told they were and probably, honestly, in the way that scientists thought they would. 

According to the CDC, the effectiveness of the vaccines is now dropped to 66% for frontline workers. That's down from 90%. Why is that? Can we get an explanation, please? Tony Fauci won't give an explanation, he's just telling everyone to get the vaccine, and then life will return to normal, maybe if you're lucky, in about a year or so, ish.

TONY FAUCI: If we can get through this winter and get really the majority, overwhelming majority of the 90 million people who have not been vaccinated, vaccinated, I hope we could start to get some good control in the spring of 2022.

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So, 15 days to slow the spread, right? OK, so now it's wear a burka and get a jab every six months in perpetuity. 

Someone needs to explain what's going on slowly, carefully with data. It's not enough to watch people who believe men can get pregnant tell us they understand the science and we don't and shut up and obey. That's not enough. Not in a democracy which we're hoping this still is. 

This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the August 25, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."