Dr. Michael Osterholm

In case you don’t know of the name, Dr. Michael Osterholm, you can read all about him here. In November 2020, Dr. Osterholm was appointed to Joe Biden's 13-member Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board.

With all of the platitudes given to the pandemic by the Biden administration, it is interesting to see what Dr. Osterholm has to say on the subject.

During a presentation to the Midway Chamber of Commerce on June 12, 2020, he said the following. (HT: Daniel Horowitz and The Blaze) This begins at approximately the 39:23 portion of the video which is also here for you to view in its entirety.

So all the data we would have say at this point that just masking of itself with a cloth mask, or a surgical mask, surely may reduce the number of particles you put out, big particles, or the big particles you get in, but it's the little particles that are coming along the sides that are the real problem. And so I'm telling you, I would throw the kitchen sink at this thing if I thought that it would make a difference. Masks are not a major issue, and by the way, in 1918, there were actually some very exhaustive studies done on masks after that, and John Barry, the historian who we work with closely, will tell you not one of them found that they made any difference.

Number two is, just think about this, common sense, this is a group of commonsense people here. The area of the world where geographically we had the most, the highest frequency of mask-wearing as just a social/cultural event was in China, Hubei Province, China, in November and December of last year. Did that mask-wearing have any impact on that emergence of that horrible, horrible city-on-fire situation? I mean, that was one where we had virtually everyone wearing a mask publicly. It didn't make a difference, and so I only say this because if you want to wear masks, go ahead, feel free. I worry, though, that people who are at risk of having severe disease will take that mask and have now assumed a level of protection that they don't really have and then put themselves in harm's way, in a way that they wouldn't have otherwise. And so there's a downside to that. Finally, I just find the social/political pressure, you know, today, if you don't wear a mask, oh my God what a bad person you are, so you know, and unfortunately we've now come to make judgments, not on science, but on basically emotions, and I worry about that, because this one's not kind of a big one. But what if we start saying, okay, all heavy people, we're going to do this to you because you're at risk of getting this disease more, or all people who are of this age, we're going to do this to you because you're at higher risk? And they can say well, you know, I'm using the same basis for making those recommendations that I made for the masks; maybe it will help. And at some point you just, I'm just a scientist, a poor lowly scientist, I'm just sitting here telling you, you know, the data, you make a decision, how you decide, and I'm telling you right now that I, the masking is not an issue.

It would certainly appear that were masks so efficient and necessary, the pandemic issue would have been solved long ago. However, we’ve been under mask mandates for about a year and there’s been little if any impact due to mask-wearing. If mask-wearing is so critical to the overall pandemic issue, why do we continue to have the problems with the pandemic?