Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer was caught on video at the Major League Baseball All-Star Game Tuesday, despite the fact that she said the county is at the high transmission level for COVID-19 on Thursday.
The clip shows Ferrer outdoors maskless, with her mask dangling on her arm in the large crowd, Fox Los Angeles reporter Travis Rice shared on Twitter. The Instagram account Vintage Los Angeles Crime originally posted the clip of her at Dodgers Stadium.
According to the Los Angeles Daily News, the county is set to go back to an indoor mask mandate if the transmission level remains high for another week. By this reasoning, the mandate could return on July 29.
Ferrer is the subject of criticism over the likely reimposing of a mandate because doctors within the county health department are debating the necessity for one in the first place, RedState’s Jennifer Oliver O’Connell reported. Doctors from Los Angeles County and the University of Southern California said on July 14 that the pandemic is not as dire in the county as it used to be, so the rise in cases would not warrant the same response.
Oliver O’Connell wrote:
The woman is a straight-up fraud, as a video of an “internal virtual weekly town hall” of Los Angeles County USC Medical Center (LAC+USC) physicians filmed that same day will clearly illustrate.
We would have never had this information, which ostensibly Ferrer has access to (“the numbers”) without the efforts of an unnamed group of Los Angeles-area moms who are fed up and have decided to show just how much of a fraud she is. They leaked the video of the LAC+USC docs discussing the state of COVID and hospitalizations at LAC+USC. These doctors were mocking the idea that a COVID crisis was occurring in Los Angeles County, and that any hysteria surrounding this was media generated.
Beyond the current situation, RedState’s managing editor Jennifer Van Laar reported Wednesday night that a study touted by the Centers for Disease Control did not disclose an important conflict of interest– one of the co-authors was Ferrer’s daughter, Kaitlin Barnes. The study suggested that masking in schools was an effective way to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, and it was reportedly cited by the CDC as the scientific basis for that specific guideline.
Van Laar wrote:
The study, published in August 2021, concluded that students who went to school during the winter of 2020-21 tested positive for COVID at a much lower rate than their peers who did not attend LA County schools. The authors also concluded that, therefore, the protocols in place in LA County were responsible for this.
A rash of stories (LA Times, WebMD, The Guardian, CNN, US News & World Report) published around the time this study was released follow the same pattern: they lead with the story of a teacher who allegedly infected 26 people by reading to her students without wearing a mask, taking care to emphasize that the teacher was one of only two unvaccinated teachers in the school. Then the stories shift: but, hey, look at this! A new study out of LA County shows that mandatory masking in schools works! CDC Director Rochelle Walensky even mentioned it in a press briefing!
Whether it’s Gov. Gavin Newsom dining at the French Laundry, San Francisco Mayor London Breed at a football game maskless, or Ferrer at the All-Star Game, the hypocrisy never ends with California politicians. An easy explanation for Ferrer’s maskless attendance is that it was outdoors, but that’s a moot point when one considers the packed crowds and her own supposed concern about the spread of the disease.
