Via Constitutionally Insulting Executive Order, Biden Mandates Masks On Planes

P. Gardner Goldsmith | January 25, 2021
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As expected, Joe Biden wasn’t satisfied with a mere Christ-mocking dozen Executive Orders on his first day in office. On January 21, day two of his administration, he offered a slew more -- and one of them is notable as a learning opportunity to find out not only about how constitutionally dubious are Executive Orders that act like “regulatory” statutes, but to learn also how poorly the constitutionally dubious NPR reports on matters like this.

The story on which we’ll focus comes to us from tax-subsidized NPR’s David Shaper, who never bothers to look into the fundamental constitutional questions about the masks, because he appears too busy trying to build a house-of-cards practical argument for Biden’s mandate. Here are the two opening paragraphs:

Mask up or you won't be allowed to board a plane, train or bus. President Biden signed an executive order Thursday, requiring passengers to wear face coverings during interstate travel. 

It's one of 10 executive orders signed by the president today aimed at addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 400,000 Americans.

So, let’s work backwards, and look at his tax-subsidized statement about the deaths.

As I have stated before and will continue to note, there is absolutely no way to verify the claim that COVID-19 has killed more than 400,000 Americans. This is because – in part – at its most fundamental level, the test most often used to determine COVID-19 “cases” is not reliable to solely diagnose disease. 

Throughout most of the pandemic, federal and state COVID19 case numbers have been based on the use of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test for diagnoses, and Dr. Kary Mullis, the creator of this test, specifically warned medical specialists not to use it as the diagnostic indicator of disease. As RC Reader reports:

PCR tests detect viral fragments from nasal or throat samples using cycle thresholds (amplification). If viral fragments are found at lower thresholds (1-30), that indicates a lot of the virus is likely present because it was found quickly. But if cycle thresholds cycle beyond 30 times, it means the viral fragments are so few that they are impossible to detect. Instead, a microbial piece of dead virus or nucleotide is detected and easily mistaken for the virus fragment, as explained by Dr. Fauci during an interview with This Week In Virology, July 2020. (See Fauci's observations in Question #1 of 'Dr. Katz Answers 11 COVID-19 Questions.')

The PCR process of “cycling” reproduces viral polymers exponentially each time a cycle is run. That’s a mathematical function of 2 to the nth power. As a result, as Dr. Anthony Fauci has explained, the more cycles are run, the higher the likelihood of false positives. Once more, RC Reader:

False-positive results are common with PCR testing, and occur with more frequency as cycle thresholds increase. Since so few cultures are being done, using the same virus fragments from the samples that tested positive, to verify active SARS-CoV-2, let alone verify enough to cause COVID-19 disease, PCR testing for diagnosis is largely inconclusive, therefore hardly trivial. The New York Times underscored PCR's limitations to effectively assess widespread risk relative to infection and/or disease during outbreaks, epidemics, or pandemic-level events back in August 2020. [RCReader.com/y/pcr1]

And, even without the PCR cycling problem, there’s the not-so-trifling political problem of the U.S. government actually subsidizing medical facilities that list deaths “with” COVID-19 as deaths “from” COVID-19, something that USA Today reported as far back as April of last year.

And, of course, while working for the Trump Administration, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx in April told reporters that the government was taking a “very liberal approach to mortality” (re the virus) treating “deaths with COVID19 as deaths from Covid19”. For the stunned and slow-learning Biden fans out there, here is video of her stating that.

But this isn’t the only area where tax-subsidized NPR gets it wrong as it tries to build the practical argument for Biden’s insane and constitutionally corrosive mask mandate. A few long and tedious paragraphs into his somnambulistic piece, Schaper writes:

The mask mandate is also needed because masks are proven to be effective in reducing the spread of the coronavirus, says Leonard Marcus, director of the Aviation Public Health Initiative at the Harvard School of Public Health, which has studied the risk of coronavirus transmission in air travel.

But the document to which he links is not a study; it’s an article. And the article openly notes, first, that confirmations of COVID-19 transmission in-flight had not (as of that article and the author’s efforts) been confirmed:

While cases of presumed in-flight transmission have been reported, scientists note that individuals may have contracted the disease before or after the flight…

And the Harvard report also notes this, which contradicts Schaper’s definitive claim that masks have been “proven” to be effective in reducing the spread of the coronavirus:

Previous research highlights the low incidence of transmission of other respiratory pathogens on airplanes ( 41) and mask use could also help control the spread of respiratory infection on aircraft.(42) 

As I noted last year, there is a profound difference between “proven” and “could” when it comes to the theoretical use of N95 masks -- the .3 micron weave of which mighthelp stop droplets from real, symptomatic, high-titer cases -- and its real use trying to stop the .1 micron viral agent in question. Not only is the weave too large to stop the virus we’re told is SARS CoV-2, in actual practice, masks often are worn incorrectly, overused, and present their own disease risk vectors.

But that doesn’t stop Schaper from making the overly-confident claim that there is “overwhelming evidence” that properly worn facemasks reduce the risk of coronavirus transmission even as he provides none of that “overwhelming evidence.”

But Schaper’s tilted report – which one easily can perceive as derisive of Trump’s handling of the “pandemic” and as praiseful of Biden’s, despite there being no constitutional authority for the feds to handle a natural pandemic – is only part of the issue. The other part is Biden’s assumption of Executive Order power to mandate mask-wearing on planes, trains, or buses traveling over state borders.

As I’ve noted in previous pieces for MRCTV, even if one cannot win the battle of stopping such unconstitutional edicts, it’s important to spread the knowledge that these orders, and all the agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration, and the National Transportation Safety Board, and any other that focus on telling us how we may or may not travel over state borders, are simply, flatly, NOT sanctioned by the Constitution.

This also applies to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which, as a matter of course, breaches the Fourth Amendment thousands of times a day by searching people without proper warrants and inserting itself between passengers and the airlines with which they have made contracts for transport.

We can remember, and tell friends that of the agencies, and the Executive Orders telling those agencies to act in accord with Biden’s mask mandates, exist because of an intentional misreading of the Interstate Commerce Clause (Art I, Sec VIII), which gives Congress the power to “regulate commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes…”

James Madison, the man known as the Father of the Constitution, the man who took notes at the 1787 Philadelphia convention, warned people that the clause was written to allow Congress to resolve trade disputes between the States (capital S) as entities, not to grant the feds power to regulate anything or anyone going over state borders. If the President can dictate to airlines, bus companies, and private rail lines that they must mandate masks on everyone who travels, then what is to stop him, or Congress, from mandating the same on any of us in cars, moving from some small town on one side of a state border to another town on the other side of the border? 

Madison would be aghast at what is happening today.

How about another question.

At what point do Americans realize that the only way to slow or stop the growth of this dystopian totalitarianism is to educate themselves and others about the so-called rules? That is how the grass roots are sewn, and how, even if one loses the immediate fight, one grows personally, gaining knowledge that can satisfy him for the long haul.

Too few people understand these fundamentally important points, and, as a resultm it sure looks like the next four years are going to be quite a haul.

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