Dr. Jonathan Reiner was neither impressed nor amused by Vice President Mike Pence’s medical decision making on Tuesday.

After the vice president openly flouted the Mayo Clinic’s own guidelines about mandatory mask usage during a visit to the healthcare facility, Reiner, a cardiologist and former Bush White House medial advisor slammed the move on CNN as “so wrong, so tone deaf.”

Speaking with Erin Burnett, Reiner pulled no punches in his take on Pence, who tried to defend his decision to violate the Mayo Clinic’s mask rule by saying he has tested negative for the coronavirus multiple times and that he wanted to thank the healthcare workers and “look them in the eye” — which is, notably, still possible while wearing a surgical-type mask.

“Wow. So wrong, so tone deaf,” Reiner fired back, when Burnett asked the doctor about his reaction. “Look, first of all, on one level this is just another in a series of mixed messages that we have gotten from the White House about this crisis. We tell the public that we want you to wear mask when you go out in public and now the vice president shows up at a hospital and refuses to wear a mask.”

“We saw today that Jet Blue is going to require all passengers to wear mask,” Reiner added, “but yet the Vice President of the United States goes to a hospital and doesn’t wear a mask.”

“I was in late last night for an emergency procedure and early this morning,” the doctor continued. “Every second in the hospital, I wore a mask. Most of the time when I wasn’t in the presence of a patient and I wore the mask and we wear the mask every time we’re in the hospital, all the time we’re in the hospital to protect our colleagues. When we tell a patient — when we tell the community to wear a mask, we’re telling them to protect their neighbors, the old lady that lives next door, the man down the street. You wear mask to protect the community.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

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