WASHINGTON (LifeSiteNews) — All three Supreme Court justices involved in an NPR report alleging internal strife over masking have issued statements declaring the story to be entirely false, but the taxpayer-funded news outlet refuses to retract it.
On Tuesday, NPR’s Nina Totenberg reported that Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whose diabetes is a risk factor for COVID-19, “did not feel safe in close proximity to people who were unmasked. Chief Justice John Roberts, understanding that, in some form asked the other justices to mask up,” yet Justice Neil Gorsuch refused to comply despite the fact that he “sits next to Sotomayor on the bench. His continued refusal since then has also meant that Sotomayor has not attended the justices’ weekly conference in person, joining instead by telephone.”
Liberal commentators quickly seized on the story as evidence of Gorsuch’s callousness, casting his opposition to COVID vaccine mandates in a negative light. But the next day, Sotomayor and Gorsuch issued a joint statement calling the report “false,” followed by a statement from Roberts revealing he never made such a request in the first place:
More developments on the mask spat — SCOTUS issues ANOTHER statement, this one from the chief justice:
“I did not request Justice Gorsuch or any other Justice to wear a mask on the bench.”
Unlike the earlier statement, this one directly disputes the original report from NPR. https://t.co/jASdJXJbaM
— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) January 19, 2022
NPR’s story has not been updated to acknowledge or include the justices’ statements. On Wednesday, Totenberg tweeted simply that “NPR stands by my reporting,” which was met with skepticism and derision:
NPR stands by my reportinghttps://t.co/eEtiNgMQet
— Nina Totenberg (@NinaTotenberg) January 19, 2022
Reporters: The Supreme Court said this
Supreme Court: No we didn't
Reporters: Well that could mean anything https://t.co/9tq3zS63UG— Matt Palumbo (@MattPalumbo12) January 19, 2022
And why use a single anonymous source for this story? It's not Watergate.
— Sharkweek (@sharkweek0178) January 20, 2022
Exactly. They are so stuffed, full of themselves they can't even see the reality. @NinaTotenberg is like a female @DanRather . Egos galore. https://t.co/1Zj8ypzj55
— RUGER, like the gun. (@_ruger_) January 20, 2022
As for the origin of the story, RealClearInvestigations reporter Mark Hemingway speculated that Sotomayor herself, or her clerks, may have been the culprits. Sotomayor is a notoriously left-wing jurist who made several false claims about COVID during oral arguments over the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates.
1/ So this is 100% conjecture, but here's the reason why I think NPR and Totenberg are standing by their story: The sources are Sotomayor and/or her clerks.
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) January 20, 2022
3/ And roping Roberts into the story and/or garbling the details of what he may or not have done behind the scenes to mange a minor conflict was a huge mistake.
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) January 20, 2022
5/ I stress again, this is pure conjecture — but that's what makes sense to me. FIN.
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) January 20, 2022
Available evidence suggests that masks have played little, if any, role in reducing COVID-19’s spread across the United States, such as the CDC’s September 2020 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.”
Last May, another study found that, though mandates effectively increased the use of masks, that use did not yield the expected benefits: “mask mandates and use (were) not associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 spread among U.S. states” from March 2020 to March 2021. In fact, the researchers found the results to be a net negative, with masks increasing “dehydration … headaches and sweating and decreas[ing] cognitive precision,” and interfering with communication, as well as impairing social learning among children.
Earlier this month, former U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner and current Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb, a respected voice among those who hold the establishment view of COVID, admitted that “cloth masks aren’t gonna provide a lot of protection” against the virus, a position for which YouTube suspended U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) as recently as August.