The throughline to Laura Ingraham’s coronavirus coverage is that she disagrees with whatever public health officials say. The Fox News host is still comparing the virus to the flu even after COVID-19 became one of the nation’s leading causes of death, and puffing up the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a cure despite the growing evidence that it is ineffective. And she has systematically denounced the recommendations that experts have offered to slow the coronavirus’s spread -- from social distancing to increased testing to contact tracing -- instead calling for a swift reopening of the economy.

Ingraham went after recommendations for Americans to wear masks in public on Wednesday night, describing them as an alarming social conditioning push by public health experts and the media to frighten people so they keep supporting state lockdowns. But here, her knee-jerk contrarianism runs into an inconvenient fact: Ingraham herself spent late March and early April talking up the benefits of widespread mask use. On her Twitter feed and Fox prime-time show, she portrayed them as an alternative to stay-at-home orders that would help get people back to work. Ingraham even used her Fox platform to teach viewers to make their own cloth masks.

At the time, public health officials were talking down the usefulness of masks for the general public, even though research suggested that their adoption could slow the spread of the virus. This was a communications failure, albeit one apparently intended to reserve the critically low supply of surgical and N95 masks for medical personnel. But as it became apparent that cloth masks were a viable alternative, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on April 3 changed its guidance and called for “wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain.” Masks have since become more common in public spaces.

Ingraham lashed out at the mask push on her Fox program Wednesday.