Ryan Warner: We often ask listeners to submit questions and for the last few months, the majority have asked why you won’t impose a statewide mask mandate. We’ve recently seen a surge in cases and a shortage of hospital beds. Is there anything that would prompt you to return to a statewide order?
Gov. Jared Polis: Our top goal is always to follow the science, and there was a time when there was no vaccine, and masks were all we had and we needed to wear them. The truth is we now have highly effective vaccines that work far better than masks. If you wear a mask, it does decrease your risk of getting COVID, and that’s a good thing to do indoors around others, but if you get COVID and you are still unvaccinated, the case is just as bad as if you were not wearing a mask. Everybody had more than enough opportunity to get vaccinated. Hopefully it’s been at your pharmacy, your grocery store, a bus near you, [or at] big events. At this point, if you haven’t been vaccinated, it’s really your own darn fault.
Warner: It has been about a year since the first doses of vaccine arrived in Colorado. You see the arrival of the vaccine as the end of mask mandates statewide. That’s your position?
Gov. Polis: We see it as the end of the medical emergency. Frankly, people who want to be protected [have gotten vaccinated]. Those who get sick, it’s almost entirely their own darn fault. I don’t want to say that nobody [will get the virus if they’re] vaccinated, but it’s very rare. Just to put it in perspective, of the about 1400 people hospitalized, less than 200 (or 16 percent) are vaccinated. And many of them are older or have other conditions. Eighty-four percent of the people in our hospitals are unvaccinated, and they absolutely had every chance to get vaccinated.
We’re talking, as you indicated, a year since the vaccines [became available]; everybody has had the chance to get vaccinated. And at this point, I think it’s almost like they made a deliberate decision not to get vaccinated. I still encourage everybody who hasn’t been vaccinated to get protected. And for those who are, make sure to get that booster after six months. The data shows it’s important and very likely even more so with this omicron variant.
This is from Michelle P. Fulcher, “Interview: Gov. Polis leaves mask mandates to local officials, says the state shouldn’t ‘tell people what to wear’” CPR News, December 10, 2021.
I remember in the late spring of 2020 when Democratic Governor Polis opened up Colorado to about the extent Republican Governor Brian Kemp opened up Georgia. The media attacked Kemp but hardly said a critical word about Polis.
The whole interview is worth reading.
READER COMMENTS
rsm
Dec 13 2021 at 1:24am
Will he legalize drugs, so we can self-medicate without overburdening hospitals? Can I get my oxygen in the forest with morphine as insurance?
Todd Kreider
Dec 13 2021 at 3:11am
“Follow the science… If you wear a mask, it does decrease your risk of getting COVID, and that’s a good thing to do indoors around others,”
Germany decided a year ago that cloth masks were useless as did the recent Bangladesh study. Here is a long list of studies that also show little to no effectiveness with surgical masks against Covid: https://swprs.org/face-masks-evidence/
Why is the governor telling healthy college students to get a vaccination when the odds of them dying if they get Covid for the first time have been calculated at 1 in 750,000 and for children under 18 a bit lower at 1 in 1,000,000 when there are small but real risks in taking these vaccines?
Liam R
Dec 13 2021 at 6:29am
Because vaccines still prevent very bad sickness as well as help stop the spread of COVID to others. They contribute to population immunity. It’s not just an individual decision.
Todd Kreider
Dec 13 2021 at 9:29am
Of course getting vaccinated is an individual decision, especially when as the case of flu shots and the mRNA shots are not sterilizing. Getting a shot helps protect older people but not others and this has been known for over half a year.
Someone who is 80 and gets both shots appears to have the same protection as an unvaccinated 55 year old which is a big decrease in the odds of hospitalization and death from Covid but a healthy primary school or college student gets essentially no real benefit because the odds of hospitalization and death are already so low and their are risks in taking that are also very low but exist that are much higher than flu shots.
Pete S.
Dec 14 2021 at 12:01pm
Does vaccination stop spread, though? TBH, I don’t know one way or the other. I assumed it would but keep reading articles which seem to say the vaccines don’t slow spread nearly as much as I expected (if at all).
That being said, I find it very hard to believe most masks do much of anything. Maybe some prevent you from inhaling some virus-laden aerosols. Maybe they stop you from sneezing out aerosols. Or maybe so much air leaks around and through my home-made mask it does nothing but fog my glasses.
Steve Brecher
Dec 14 2021 at 12:52pm
NIOSH-passed N95 masks are available on Amazon for 72 cents each. I’m not wearing mine now, but I ordered some more recently to have on hand if/when the Omicron variant surges in my extended neighborhood.
Lizard Man
Dec 13 2021 at 7:41am
So why not mandate masks that work?
Medicare and Medicaid should be sending a box of N95 masks to all beneficiaries every month with instructions on how to sanitize them between uses. And maybe a box of those super cheap COVID tests that they have in Europe. That would be far cheaper than paying for their hospitalization.
Alan Goldhammer
Dec 13 2021 at 9:27am
Masks fail due to user error in not making sure they are properly worn. I’ve seen way too many people who have a mask only covering their mouth or they wear a medical mask that is open at the sides (there are plenty of YouTube videos that show how to fix medical procedure masks so they don’t buckle open at the sides).
Properly sourced South Korea N94 masks work just as well as N95 masks and are less expensive. They come in several different head sizes and I’ve found they provide a very secure fit around my face. Aaron Collins, an aerosol engineer by training, has done extensive research on over 200 types of masks and offers suggestions about which ones work best. For those who continue to be skeptical about the efficacy of masks, take a look at his website.
Ryan M
Dec 13 2021 at 10:20pm
Because whether or not the work is irrelevant to whether it is ethical and constitutional to mandate them.
What then is your limiting principle? A soda ban seems a no-brainer; obviously all tobacco products; potato chips. Why not skiing, skate boarding, motorcycles, bicycles on city streets?
john hare
Dec 13 2021 at 4:00am
Anti-shot guy at the Christmas party Saturday night was almost amusing, if it wasn’t such a serious subject. He was explaining in great detail to one of the guys how the vaccines were poisons designed to cut down on the population.
Mark Brophy
Dec 13 2021 at 7:13am
All cause mortality is higher in 2021, the year of the vaccines, than it was in 2020, the year without vaccines. Correlation may not be causation but it looks like the vaccines and other bad government policies are succeeding in cutting down the population. Was that an accident or the purpose of the vaccines?
Michael
Dec 13 2021 at 7:58am
“Correlation is not causation… unless it suits my argument” is an interesting confession to make. The most highly vaccinated states in are the ones that have seen the fewest deaths per capita in 2021. For most of the pandemic, the top 3 states in Covid deaths per capita were the three northeast states, MA, NY, NJ, that were sites of the earliest wave. The case fatality rate was higher there because physicians had not yet figured out the best way to treat the disease. Over the past few months, the least vaccinated states – mostly in the deep south – have caught up and often surpassed the northeast states in Covid deaths per capita.
The top 10: 1) Mississippi, 2) Alabama, 3) New Jersey, 4) Louisiana, 5) Oklahoma, 6) New York, 7) Arkansas, 8) Georgia, 9) Florida, 10) Massachusetts.
Over the next week, another low-vaccinated state, West Virginia, will knock Massachusetts out of the top 10.
robc
Dec 13 2021 at 9:29am
Is it vaccination rate or demographics?
What are the top 10 states for diabetes?
If we are going to try to figure out causation, lets make sure we get all the possible causes on the table.
Todd Kreider
Dec 13 2021 at 9:41am
“The case fatality rate was higher there because physicians had not yet figured out the best way to treat the disease.”
This isn’t true for the Northeast in general. True, the Covid fatality rate in NY, NJ and PA were high in the beginning because the governors ordered recovering Covid patients into nursing homes where Covid could spread like wildfire. But apart from learning to use ventilators less, doctors haven’t been able to care for Covid patients much better than in May 2020.
Todd Kreider
Dec 13 2021 at 9:43am
That should be: ” True, the Covid fatality rate in NY, NJ and PA were high in the beginning partly because the governors ordered recovering Covid patients …”
steve
Dec 13 2021 at 11:00am
The death rate really was higher in the first few months because we had nothing that worked and it took a while to figure it out. It took several months to figure out that steroids help, that proning helps and anti-coagulants reduce morbidities. The issue was not so much using ventilators less as finding an alternative and learning that it was OK to not intubate early. (The early info from Italy was that there was a lot of laryngeal edema and if you did not intubate early you wouldn’t be able to intubate late when needed. This turned out not as bad as expected.) Once we learned that it was safe to use Hi_Flo and CPAP/BiPap on covid pts we did not need to put as many on ventilators. It turned out that for most covid pts it was a pure oxygenation issue and not so much an ARDS picture as feared so the non-invasive methods worked. (We do see some ARDS and some pts progressing to severe fibrosis with some of those getting transplanted.)
We did sort this out pretty quickly, I think, so that by sometime in May/June this info was widely spread and adopted into everyone’s protocols. However, that was after the surge of deaths in the NE. (The nursing home thing is just a thing for those whose interests are politically driven not medically.)
My network is about 60 miles from NYC so we got hit pretty hard. We, like most other networks, tracked our own internal stats. Our death rate dropped by just a bit under 50% between March and June, 21% to 13%. It is now under 10%. This parallels what we see in NYC and other hospitals.
Steve
Ryan M
Dec 13 2021 at 10:22pm
Precisely why it should be an individual choice. I’d note that you were both happily at the same Christmas party.
steve
Dec 13 2021 at 11:06am
Query- I largely agree with the governor. Why do the unvaccinated come to the hospital once they get sick? They dont believe us about masks, vaccines, medications or much of anything else but once they cant breathe they show up in the ED? Why not just take an extra Ivermectin? You dont trust us anyway and then cause a lot of grief when you do get admitted. We now have pts lying about covid exposures when they come in for elective care.
Steve
Yaakov Schatz
Dec 13 2021 at 3:49pm
People have the right to believe whatever they want.
They can chose to believe in some medical procedures and reject others.
They can chose to believe in some vaccines and reject others.
They can even just disagree with your cost-benefit analysis or reject vaccines on moral grounds.
Whatever their reason for not getting vaccinated that is not a reason to deny them medical care they paid for.
Lizard Man
Dec 13 2021 at 8:43pm
My insurance premiums and taxes pay for the hospital treatment costs for the unvaccinated.
Ryan M
Dec 13 2021 at 10:32pm
That’s a good reason to regulate everything.
Same goes for the obese. Same for people who engage in risky activities like riding motorcycles. Smokers, etc…
Your taxes pay for roads, fires, the military… What else? When you think about it, virtually no behavior exists that doesn’t impact everyone else in some way. Liberty is, in that respect, something that imposes a cost on everyone. So why do we tolerate liberty at all? Again, what’s your limiting principle? Perhaps all health care should be given our based on merit. Only save the healthy, the responsible, the productive. Only allow taxpayers to recurve healthcare- and certainly only allow landowners to vote. Good idea- but I don’t think it’s a very new one.
Yaakov Schatz
Dec 14 2021 at 6:28pm
Then lets privatize healthcare.
Ryan M
Dec 13 2021 at 10:25pm
I think you know the answer to this. You don’t have to agree with all treatments in order to agree with certain others. I would imagine this applies to you in many ways.
Out of curiosity, do you agree that anyone with a BMI over 24 should be denied medical care following a heart attack? If not, why? And goodness- they don’t listen when we tell them to exercise, why would they even come to the hospital?
Todd Kreider
Dec 13 2021 at 12:37pm
Steve wrote:
1) “The nursing home thing is just a thing for those whose interests are politically driven not medically.”
——————————
This is not true. The governors sending recovering Covid patients notably added to deaths in those states even if not the primary cause of the higher death rate.
2) “The death rate really was higher in the first few months because we had nothing that worked and it took a while to figure it out. It took several months to figure out that steroids help, that proning helps and anti-coagulants reduce morbidities. The issue was not so much using ventilators less as finding an alternative and learning that it was OK to not intubate early. …We did sort this out pretty quickly, I think, so that by sometime in May/June this info was widely spread and adopted into everyone’s protocols”
————————————-
Everything that made a real difference in lowering the Covid death rate was used by early May until vaccinations became available. The Southern part of the first wave had a notably lower death rate from Covid for various reasons of which some are still not known. There is more obesity in the South but also life expectancy is 76 to 77 in the deep south while it is 79 to 80 in the Northeast, which makes a big difference. Also, ventilation was used much less from May.
Interestingly, some Italian doctors said in June 2020 that the severity of Covid cases had dropped significantly after the first few weeks and so much so that one said it was “practically a different disease” that they were seeing. I have no idea why and haven’t read epidemiologists speculate on this possibility.
steve
Dec 13 2021 at 2:26pm
We had used the therapies I mentioned by May but it took a while for everyone to adopt them. Not everyone had the staffing to be able to do proning. Lets not forget that the British paper on steroids did not come out until June. The study did not end until June 8th. A lot of people were already using it in anticipation but lots were also waiting to see results of study. Regardless, if you look at deaths for NY you see that by early May deaths were about 1/4 of what they were at end of April. NJ, MA, PA and others nearby followed by a couple of weeks.
https://www.recoverytrial.net/files/recovery_dexamethasone_statement_160620_final.pdf
Steve
Todd Kreider
Dec 14 2021 at 8:50am
Pandemics usually follow this pattern and has very little to do with improvement in care. It’s known as the Gompertz curve. Sweden’s spring of 2020 Covid cases and death pattern looks almost the same as New York’s despite not locking down and no mask use. The difference is that the peak is flatter in Sweden than in New York but otherwise almost identical.
Etewa
Dec 14 2021 at 11:37am
Unfortunately, Governor Polis is pulling a fast one. While it is true that there is no state mask mandate, ALL of the counties in the Denver area, covering most of the state, have instituted a mask mandate. All businesses are required to enforce the wearing of masks at all indoor spaces.
David Henderson
Dec 14 2021 at 1:56pm
I don’t think that means he’s pulling a fast one. He’s leaving it up to the counties and, at the same time, making a sensible argument about why there shouldn’t be mask mandates.
Ryan M
Dec 14 2021 at 4:51pm
This is something that I dislike about the idea of federalism. Namely, that somehow a bad idea gets better the more localized it is. I have seen that response so many times – that these things should be state and local issues. Leaving aside the reality that if it is illegal and unwise at the federal level, it is probably also illegal, but it is certainly also unwise at the state level; and if it is bad at the state level, I don’t want my county or city government to do it, either.
I’m not accusing anyone of denying this fact, but I do sometimes think it gets lost when we talk about federalism.
David Henderson
Dec 14 2021 at 6:52pm
I agree with you. But I like the degrees of freedom that federalism gives.
We have 5 supervisors in Monterey County who voted 3-2, well after the Omicron version was well known, not to impose indoor making. But yesterday, a state official, on his own, imposed indoor masking for all of California. With county choice, we would likely have avoided this.
Ryan M
Dec 15 2021 at 12:08pm
There is also more accountability at the local level. I know my elected state senator (it helps that I knew him before he ran for office) and talk to him often. Local officials, though often still exceedingly arrogant and blind, are still more accountable than state and federal ones.
My complaint is with those who note local overreach and say “federalism at work,” as if that makes it OK. Of course, generally, I think that argument is used by people who don’t actually agree with federalism, as an attempt at some sort of slam dunk against those who do, which is why it falls flat.
J Mann
Dec 16 2021 at 12:37pm
I’ll defend federalism.
It provides data. Not perfect experimental data, but still data. For example, I’m highly skeptical of current decriminalization experiments, but I’m all for some places trying them if the local voters approve. Who knows, maybe they’re right and the rest of us can learn something.
Without federalism, the tendency is to impose the solution that looks best to whoever’s in charge, but then it becomes very hard to see if there are better alternatives available.
In sufficiently important cases, it allows people to vote with their feet, by moving to an area that has the rules they prefer.
Ryan M
Dec 14 2021 at 4:47pm
Another thought occurs to me as I think about the responses to this post, as well as the remarks of the governor himself.
We’ve recently seen tornados rip through Kentucky and a few other states. This is not terribly uncommon, though it was uncommonly devastating. I’ve seen many articles about ongoing searches, how many have died, how many have been found alive. My thought is this: because tornados are not terribly uncommon in those areas, many houses are built with storm cellars. Even individuals who do not have pre-built cellars generally have the ability to build some sort of shelter for safety. It seems like a no-brainer, just like it seems like a no-brainer to not live in a house that is dangerously close to an ocean shore in an area where hurricanes are common. Just like many people are claiming that it is a no-brainer to get vaccinated.
What I want to know is this: Should we be searching for people who took no measures to protect themselves when tornado warnings were sounded? People who didn’t prepare over the course of a year or many years for the inevitability of a tornado in their area? Should we provide aid to these individuals who have lost their homes? Would anyone object to a bill that says insurance providers do not need to make payments for losses if homeowners did not install tornado shelters?
I have asked many times on this thread why it is generally considered morally objectionable not simply to ration our sympathy based on merit, but to go so far as to actually deny care to those with whose actions we disagree – while there are now so many people suggesting that we do exactly that with respect to covid. I have not seen any of the commenters address this question, but it seems to be an incredibly important question. Why do we not do this? And why should we not do this with respect to every individual decision a person makes?
Or is there any wisdom to the parable of the good Samaritan, who stopped to help a person who he may have personally detested?
J Mann
Dec 16 2021 at 12:41pm
The issue is whether we should force people to do things for their own good because we think their choices are wrong.
Sometimes, we decide yes, as in seatbelt laws. Other times, we don’t do so – many states don’t require motorcycle helmets.
I think you can argue Covid falls on one side or the other, but there’s definitely a debate over whether it’s OK to force someone to do things that we believe to be in their own interest.
Comments are closed.