Although the vice president appeared to follow social distancing guidelines during the discussion, he did not wear a mask, nor did any of the officials who accompanied him on Air Force Two from Washington: Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and Iowa’s two Republican senators, Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst. The Des Moines Register reported that, before the event, “staffers with gloves and masks took the temperatures of people who entered the building one at a time.” Video of the hall showed that very few of the people in the audience were wearing masks.
After the event, at which the chief executive of Smithfield Foods choked up when mentioning the death of a worker from Covid-19, the union that represents Iowa meat-packers, who have been forced back to work by an executive order from the president despite outbreaks at their plants, suggested that it would have been more useful for Pence, Perdue, Grassley and Ernst to have worked a shift alongside them. “They should work in the same conditions and under the same fear that our members and their fellow Iowans work under every day,” the United Food and Commercial Workers union said in a statement.
Video of the earlier event attended by the vice president, a meeting with Iowa faith leaders to discuss the planned reopening of places of worship, showed that just one participant, Rabbi David Kaufman, wore a mask.
[...]
[T]he new rapid-response Abbott ID NOW test kit for Covid-19 used in the White House produced false negatives nearly 15 percent of the time in research conducted in April, as the director of the National Institutes of Health reminded senators on Thursday.
Even more reliable testing that uses invasive nasal swabs and takes longer to get results can produce some false negatives. [...] False negatives also appear more likely for people who are carrying the virus but have no symptoms.
That means that someone like Pence could go out into the world with a false sense of security after testing negative and unwittingly infect someone else by not wearing a mask while speaking loudly enough to spray the virus in salivary droplets on to their face.
That was theoretically possible last week, when Pence was the only person at the Mayo Clinic not following its mandatory mask-wearing policy, but it was even more obviously so on Friday when his press secretary, Katie Miller, tested positive for the virus just one day after she had tested negative.
While the president suggested, wrongly, that the only possible explanation was that Miller had somehow contracted the virus overnight, the fact is that her positive test, along with that of a White House valet the day before, exposes the absurdity of the president refusing to wear a mask or let anyone around him do so.
The Intercept
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