Fox News host Tucker Carlson blasted Democratic Oregon Gov. Kate Brown's "nonsensical" outdoor masking order during Wednesday night's "Tucker Carlson Tonight" opening monologue.
Calling face masks "a quick and simple tool we can immediately deploy to protect ourselves and our families" in a Tuesday statement, Brown announced the Friday reimposition of a statewide outdoor masking mandate which applies to both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.
Today we have 1,000 COVID-19 patients in our hospitals. I’m continuing to take actions to protect Oregonians and save lives.
— Governor Kate Brown (@OregonGovBrown) August 24, 2021
Effective Friday 8/27, masks will be required in public outdoors settings where physical distancing is not possible, regardless of vaccination status. pic.twitter.com/0EU6bteTPU
"At this point, it’s almost pointless to apply the traditional measures of logic, of reason, and data to decrees like that one," Carlson said of the Oregon governor's order. "Kate Brown’s decree is nonsensical. 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 Guy reported back in April, outdoor mask mandates are a special kind of stupid. After quoting Dr. Anthony Fauci himself calling outdoor Covid risk "really, really quite low," Carlson cited an Ireland study that traced only one in a thousand cases to outdoor transmission.
'So as a factual matter, Kate Brown’s order is absurd," the Fox News host said.
Carlson went on cite a new study from the University of Waterloo to criticize the use of cloth and surgical masks as a means to stop or significantly slow down Covid transmission:
But even if you ignore 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 - it 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 masks 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 mask only filtered about 10% of the aerosol droplets. 90% got through.
"So on every level, the order you just saw from Kate Brown is ridiculous," Carlson continued. "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."
Watch the entire segment below: