“Hold on, I’ve got a mask for you right here,” Colbert said on his CBS show, staring defiantly into the camera while appearing to make a crude gesture with his hand, which was wrapped loosely in a surgical mask.Colbert wasn’t the only person who objected to seeing the lower half of Pence’s face Tuesday. The late-night host was joined by fellow TV comics and medical professionals, all of whom roundly criticized Pence for failing to set the right example amid the pandemic by knowingly disregarding the hospital’s masking policy.By early Wednesday, Pence’s name and “Mayo Clinic” were trending on Twitter as critics slammed the vice president for promoting “completely irresponsible public health messaging.”Videos and photos of Pence’s visit to one of the country’s premier hospitals began circulating widely on social media Tuesday afternoon. In one clip from PBS NewsHour, a barefaced Pence could be seen elbow-bumping and chatting with multiple people inside the clinic. Everyone else visible in the video was sporting a mask, adhering to the clinic’s recently instituted requirement that all patients and visitors wear a facial covering while on the premises.The Mayo Clinic wrote in a now-deleted tweet that Pence and his team were aware of the masking policy ahead of Tuesday’s tour.Pence later defended his decision to go mask-less, telling reporters that he and everyone around him are regularly tested for the virus. Pence, President Trump and other officials have regularly appeared at White House coronavirus briefings often standing close to one another without masks, even after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidance earlier this month encouraging people to use the face coverings in “public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain.”“Since I don’t have the coronavirus, I thought it’d be a good opportunity for me to be here, to be able to speak to these researchers, these incredible health-care personnel, and look them in the eye and say thank you,” Pence said Tuesday. (It is unclear how wearing a mask, which usually only covers the lower half of a person’s face, would have obstructed Pence’s vision.)But Pence’s explanation did little to quell the backlash.On CNN, Jonathan Reiner, a cardiologist who treated former vice president Richard B. Cheney, ripped Pence’s actions as “so wrong, so tone-deaf.”“The vice president wouldn’t disrespect a synagogue and not wear a skull cap when he walked into a temple or he wouldn’t refuse to remove his shoes when he walked into a mosque,” said Reiner, a professor at the George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences. “Hospitals are our new holy places and he’s completely disrespecting the sacrifice that the nurses and the docs and the staff in hospitals make by not wearing a mask. What is he saying to them?”VP Pence went on a tour of the Mayo Clinic's coronavirus testing labs Tuesday while not wearing a mask, despite hospital rules that all occupants wear one. https://t.co/LHcrsOTb2g
— NBC News (@NBCNews) April 28, 2020