White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki tried to explain the Biden administration’s changing position on mask mandates on Tuesday by telling reporters on Tuesday that there was no “playbook” for dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.
She had the following exchange with Peter Doocy of Fox News, who asked about President Joe Biden’s guarantees in May that people who had been vaccinated would not have to wear masks anymore (via White House, emphasis added):
Q And then, on the CDC guidance, why did the President say, “If you’ve been fully vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask. Let me repeat: If you are fully vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask” if it was possible that that was going to turn out not to be true?
MS. PSAKI: Well, Peter, I think we’re all dealing with an evolving virus where there’s no playbook and no historic precedent. And what the American people should feel confident in is that we are going to continue to be guided by science, look at public health data in order to provide new guidance, if it’s needed, to save lives, to protect the American people.
When he made those comments back in May, we were dealing with a very different strain of the virus than we were — than we are today. And Delta is more transmissible. It’s spreading much more quickly. It was nearly non-existent in the United States back in May.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, then-candidate Joe Biden constantly claimed that Trump had set aside a so-called “playbook” that the outgoing Obama-Biden admiration prepared for pandemics. (In reality, as Breitbart News was the first to report, the “playbook” was a short document that largely summarized other documents and had little information.)
The Biden White House now claims there is no “playbook” and “no historic precedent” for the coronavirus pandemic.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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