Biden, Harris Call for National Mask Mandate: ‘Be a Patriot, Protect Your Fellow Citizens’

In a joint campaign event Thursday in Delaware, former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris called for a national mask mandate as the coronavirus pandemic continues.

“Every single American should be wearing a mask when they’re outside for the next three months at a minimum,” Biden said. “Every governor should mandate mandatory mask wearing. The estimates by the experts are it will save over 40,000 lives in the next three months if people act responsibly. It’s not about your rights, it’s about your responsibilities as an America.”

Biden continued by emphasizing the preventative health benefits of wearing masks, and that “every American wearing masks outdoors” will help the country return to normal sooner.

“When I get occasionally confronted with a person in public about wearing a mask, I say ‘Look, this is America. Be a patriot, protect your fellow citizens.’ Step up! Do the right thing,” Biden said. “A lot of people are dying. We’re up over 160,000 people dead so far…It didn’t have to be this way.”

When Biden gave the stage to his running mate, Harris praised his remarks saying “that’s what real leadership looks like.”

“As a nation, we should all be wearing a mask for the next three months because it will save lives,” she said. “What real leadership looks like is Joe Biden. To speak up, sometimes telling us the stuff we don’t necessarily want to hear but we need to know. And the need for ts mandatory mask wearing will also be about what Joe has articulated and what a Biden/Harris administration will do in terms of creating a pandemic testing board to get tens of millions of testing kits where needed, too build a public health jobs core, hiring at least 100,000 Americans, to lead us through contact tracing, as soon as we take office.”

Watch above, via CNN.