News
Featured Image
 Chip Somodevilla / Staff / Getty

WASHINGTON, May 21, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — Six House Republicans were fined $500 apiece this week for refusing to comply with Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s rule that non-speaking members must remain masked while inside the House of Representatives chamber, even though the majority of representatives are already vaccinated.

The New York Post reported that roughly a dozen went maskless during floor votes Tuesday, with a few “making a point to stand in the well of the House chamber to ensure that spectators, colleagues and the C-SPAN cameras could not miss them.” Seven received warning letters from the House Sergeant-at-Arms, with Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia making public displays of what they thought of it: 

Massie, Greene, Brian Mast of Florida, Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, Beth Van Duyne of Texas, and Ralph Norman of South Carolina were subsequently fined $500 each. Seventy-three percent of House members have already taken a COVID-19 vaccine, including every Democrat; Miller-Meeks and Norman were fined despite having been vaccinated as well.

“The only time that Pelosi and her socialists really seem to care about the science is when they can use it as a weapon to control the American people,” Van Duyne told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Thursday evening. “You’ve seen them use it to be able to close schools and to keep businesses closed and to make people more dependent on the government. You have seen them ignore science regarding masks when they can continue to control people, to stoke fear and make them obey … They continue to stoke this fear, and I got to the point where I just said, ‘Forget it. I’m done. I’m done.’”

Massie also noted Thursday evening that House Democrats, including Pelosi, didn’t practice what they mandate during a recent White House gathering; Pelosi’s defenders responded by claiming everyone at the White House event was fully vaccinated:

The available evidence suggests that masks played a relatively small role, if any, in reducing the virus’s spread over the past year. Early in 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams counseled against wearing masks, as did White House COVID-19 czar Dr. Anthony Fauci. But the public later learned that health officials actually wanted to discourage the general public from buying masks to conserve the supply for health workers.

Despite the popular insistence that masking was essential outside one’s home, there remain reasons to doubt their effectiveness, such as the CDC’s September acknowledgement that masks cannot be counted on to keep out the coronavirus when spending 15 minutes or longer within six feet of someone, or a May 2020 study published by CDC’s peer-reviewed journal Emerging Infectious Diseases that “did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission, either when worn by infected persons (source control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility.”