The mask of comedy

By Jude Josue L. Sabio .

THE second-highest elected public official in the US, Vice President Mike Pence, said it all: he did not wear a face mask because he is not infected and could not infect others.

Pence was captured on video as he visited the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, mingling with its staff and a patient in a room, without wearing the ubiquitous face mask.

“Since I don’t have the coronavirus, I thought it’d be a good opportunity for me to be here, to be able to speak to these researchers, these incredible health care personnel, and look them in the eye and say thank you,” he is reported by Yahoo News to have said.

His intentional non-wearing of the mask is at odds with the policy of the Mayo clinic which was relayed to the Covid-19 task force of Mr. Pence. It was also at variance with the suggestion of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that masks should be worn in public settings.

Without the Vice President saying it directly, Vice President Pence’s brave defiance reveals something implicit: the US government’s official rejection of the legitimacy of this so-called Covid-19.

Mr. Pence’s actuation is not personal to him but is shared by US President Donald Trump himself and his key officials. President Trump has bravely faced the media almost on a daily face-to-face basis without ever wearing a face mask.

Incidentally, like Trump, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro also bravely appeared in a huge public gathering in Brazil without the face mask.

This American official defiance comes amid a growing number of American medical personalities who are voicing their thoughts that this covid-19 is not fundamentally different from seasonal influenza.

In my previous articles, I have mentioned the following American doctors, namely; Dr. Fauci, Dr. Kauffman, Dr. Witkkowski, and Dr. Erickson.

Another prominent doctor is Dr. Shiva who wrote a letter to President Trump proposing a course of action for the lifting of the lockdown. A republican independent running for Senator in New York, Dr. Shiva is also very critical against the lockdown.

This defiance comes at a time when the US government is reported to have effected arrests of certain personalities, the most prominent of whom is Dr. Lieber, a Harvard professor who lied to federal investigators about his link to and work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

This open and public defiance comes also at a time after President Trump was reported to have claimed that the coronavirus is a hoax and is artificially induced and that the coronavirus would just disappear, apparently about influenza that disappears in spring or after the flu season.

The fearless defiance of the face mask comes after President Trump recently announced the partial lifting of the lockdown, even tweeting for the liberation of certain states from the lockdown, generating a wave of unbelievable massive protests occurring in 12 states, despite the mainstream media’s reporting and the state government’s claims of a public health threat.

Mr. Pence’s defiance of the face mask comes after protesters, who did not wear the face mask, clamoring for the lifting of the state-wide lockdown based principally on their outcry that this Covid-19 is just the flu. The defiance follows the social media bearing witness to the surge of activists protesting against this media-hyped covid affair and condemning the lockdown.

These two elected highest US public officials to defy the face mask, even if the USA is reported to have 39 million influenza cases from November 2019 to March 2020, which is roughly the influenza season in the northern hemisphere that runs up to April. The public health threat being reported by western media did not deter these public officials from defying the face mask, for, after all, they do not believe in such a threat, in much the same way that the USA did not feel threatened by the seasonal flu.

The actions of these high officials reflect a deep official attitude of the US government against the legitimacy of this covid-19 flu. From reliable indications, the US government is currently conducting an in-depth investigation into the matter in the aftermath of those arrests, especially in light of its antagonism against China and the WHO and in the context of the upcoming presidential elections.

The fact that the USA high officials are not wearing face masks can only mean that something is in the offing that could overturn the whole dubious narrative of this covid-19 affair, which could be akin to Galileo’s revolutionary theory of the world being round that debunked the then long-held conventional view that the world is flat.

Here in our country, our government has been infected with the virus of fear instead, by acting cowardly like an elephant being attacked by an ant, tripping in panic and fear, and falling into the cliff to meet its death.

In fact, the wearing of this face mask has lately reached the level of comedy, if not insanity. The police attempted to arrest Javier Parra at a posh village in Metro Manila. The police demanded a fine from Parra’s helper for not wearing a mask while she was watering the plants inside the residential area of Mr. Parra, a foreign national.

It would be understandable if the failure to wear a mask happens in a public setting. But it happened within the premises of a residential place which is not a public setting; the village road was even shown on the video to be so empty that it was completely devoid of any reason to force the mask.

The excessive strictness about the face mask reflects, on the whole, the inexplicable absurdity of this lockdown by the Philippine government which, if it is any indication, did not even impose it during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009, the first-ever WHO-directed pandemic in the 21st century.

The absurdity of this lockdown, as reflected by the comedy and insanity behind this face mask, is brought even more to light when it is realized that this “influenza-like Covid-19” is not even deadlier than influenza or “influenza-like illness” in the Philippines.

In an official report of the DOH that I cited in my previous articles, which is available online, the Philippines registered 68,091 cases of “influenza-like illness” in January to June 2019 or a monthly average of 11,348. The reported current covid-19 cases of 6,000 to 7,000, if assumed to be true as a monthly figure, are lower than the monthly average of 11,348 for the “influenza-like illness”, more popularly known as the flu. In other words, covid-19 is not even deadlier than the flu.

This government never in the previous years imposed the wearing of face masks against the flu which is deadlier than this “influenza-like covid-19”. By parity of reason, there is no rationale at all for enforcing this face mask against this “influenza-like Covid-19” that is shown to be not even deadlier than the flu.

Not even in the USA where there have been millions of influenza cases in their yearly seasonal influenza, the latest being the 39 million cases from November 2019 to March 2020 per CDC data, did the US government impose the wearing of the face mask.

President Trump and his Vice President Pence are laudable in their rejection of the face mask that has become the symbol of absurdity, if not insanity and tyranny. They are in league with other brave leaders like Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro who mocked the covid-19 as just a “little flu” and the leaders of Sweden and Norway who pursued the path of “herd immunity” – not lockdown – in the fight against this “little flu”.

In our case, we are helpless in the face, unfortunately, of a government that prides itself in its fear of the “influenza-like Covid-19” when it continuously imposed this lockdown that is not backed up by science, and therefore whimsical, arbitrary and capricious.

The wearing of this face mask is really a comedy when seen in the context of a situation where the reported covid-19 infections do not rise even to the level of influenza. It is a comedy if seen further in the context of very hot sunlight in our climate killing the virus quickly and making the mask unnecessary.

The face mask has become a monstrous symbol of this government’s uncontrollable fear as a tool or pretext to make people so afraid that they would just obey anything this government tells them to do, without them realizing that the dynastic, oligarchic ruling political elite is just hell-bent on making money out of the huge covid-19 “bayanihan” fund destined to be a Covid-19 fund “scamdemic” of cosmic proportions.

(Jude Josue Sabio is a lawyer from Misamis Oriental. The views expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the position of this paper.)