Redfield was more right than Trump. And very clever in how he spoke about masks and vaccines. He used the slippery language of an experienced bureaucrat someone with training in linguistics could spot at the time. I'll deconstruct this:
"In congressional testimony yesterday, Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), emphasized the value of face masks in preventing transmission of COVID-19. "These face masks are the most important, powerful public health tool we have," he told a Senate subcommittee while holding a cloth mask. "I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine."
As The New York Times notes, Donald Trump is notably less enthusiastic about face masks. Redfield "made a mistake" when he said masks provide better protection than vaccines, the president told reporters yesterday. While masks "may be effective," he said, a "vaccine is much more effective.""
FF Deconstruct
1 - "The most important, powerful public health tool we have."
The ONLY efficacy of masks was/is based in *Behavioral* Science (BS). Nonpharmaceutical Interventions (NPI). Pseudoscience, not medical science. The science of symbols and language that provoke a change in perceptions to effect a desired change in behavior. Epidemiologists employ BS to make the public fearful of public interactions in order to "slow the spread" they believe they must do to protect public health when there's an outbreak of disease. It's why the masks most everyone wore were called "placebo masks" in the medical community...right up until March, 2020.
Placebo = psychological fake out:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/placebo
Those promoting mask NPI leaned into that definition of placebo that includes "soothing" a fearful public. When the reality was the NPI worked by "amplifying fear" (a BS term) because we were all diagnosed as suffering from "optimism bias" (another BS term) and weren't taking the declared health risk seriously enough for health officials. They wanted us scared of one another. Just like masked hijackers and bank robbers frighten us:
Of snakes and faces: An evolutionary perspective on the psychology of fear
Scandanavian Journal of Psychology, November 19, 2009 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-9450.2009.00784.x
So when Redfield said those words about masking it was a tacit admission that the only tool they had was fear! The most powerful tool a government possesses. And there's a fine line between a tool and a weapon, only the intentions of the hands they're in distinguishes which.
2 - "this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine."
Another tacit admission that the COVID vaccine wasn't going to work. He knew what it was in development, that it was unproven, ineffective and had safety issues. And that you can't vaccinate your way out of a pandemic. He knew the same medical science that vaccine researchers knew about that...pre-2020.
Redfield's clever linguistics revealed that the only thing government could do with any potential at all during a pandemic was scare people apart. Not that it even was desirable or that terrorizing entire populations was without high cost. But a tacit admission that, in fact, when it comes to public health there's only fear that governments can peddle to mitigate flu-like disease. Isolate and avoid the world if you're sick or fear getting sick.
Just like everyone knew and did for every single flu season in history before 2020. Aside from the Spanish Flu, the results of that pandemic's restrictions were similarly disastrous. Written about by medical leaders at the time in their Lessons of the Pandemic. In which they said the best thing we can do is eat right, get fresh air, exercise, sunlight. And stay in good cheer, be a good neighbor and go to church for spiritual strength in hard times. Literally in the Lessons:
https://sci-hub.se/https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.49.1274.501
Lessons that we did not learn from history. Because there's too much money and power that the Big corporate profiteers and Big government social engineers benefit from by "amplifying fear" aka, "terrorizing." Trump was horribly wrong about vaccines, and masks for that matter - neither are effective. As big a cocksucker Redfield is, if you drilled down inside his words he was more accurate than Trump.
Redfield used his bureaucratic fluency and mastery in linguistics to convey truth inside a tangled web of deception. Knowing the environment he was inside, Big corporation and Big government opportunists. Which takes someone highly trained in linguistics to decipher. Bureaucrat-ese.
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