Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva — who is refusing the enforce the recent mask mandate to slow the spread of the COVID Delta variant despite 10,000 new infections a week — showed his ignorance about basic COVID data during a trainwreck interview on CNN on July 18.
Anchor Pamela Brown asked Villanueva why he was not going to enforce the public health department’s new mask mandate even though the deadly virus is spreading through the unvaccinated population, and Villanueva responded by telling her it’s the unvaccinated who are getting infected:
You may be trying to tug at heartstrings, but your argument falls apart when 99 percent of everyone in the hospital right now in the ERs and the ICUs are the unvaccinated.
Brown quickly destroyed Villanueva’s painful “logic”:
I’m not trying to pull at heartstrings; I’m just trying to get to the facts here that kids under the age of 12 can’t get vaccinated. And so, doctors say, it’s about protecting them as well.
Villanueva abdicated his responsibility to the public by claiming family members needed to do their own medical “risk assessments”:
Well, just like any population is vulnerable, you’ve got to pick and choose where you’re going to expose yourself. If kids under 12 are not vaccinated, then their parents need to pick and choose exactly where they’re going to expose them publicly. That’s up to the family member to understand and make those risk assessments on an individual basis.
(Sources: Los Angeles Magazine, CNN via Twitter, Los Angeles Times)