Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey, early on in the pandemic, was one of the most zealous and ardent supporters of imposing harsh mandates. When it came to masks, he was first in line to require them for everyone everywhere.
However, give credit where credit is due: Murphy has finally bowed to science, unlike most of his Democratic peers around the country, and dropped his state’s mandate for masks in K-12 schools.
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Murphy announced that the school mask mandate ends March 7. That’s really far later than any data justify, but it’s still better than nothing.
To the south, Delaware’s Democratic governor, John Carney, deserves one cheer out of three. He announced this week that he is lifting Delaware’s statewide mask mandates. It makes absolutely no sense at all that he is lifting it for indoor adult activities more than a full month before the mandate on schoolchildren expires March 30 — the virus, after all, poses no serious risk to children and a far more serious risk even to vaccinated adults — but Democrats have been so disappointing overall during the pandemic that one must accept better late than never.
Most Democrats deserve no such plaudits. Indeed, some of them richly deserve to be condemned. Stacey Abrams, the failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate from Georgia who is running again this year, removed her mask to speak and pose for photo ops with schoolchildren in the classroom who were forced to keep their masks on. If her intention was to send the message that she is more important than these children, their parents, and their teachers, or to show that coronavirus restrictions only apply to the little people and not herself, she succeeded.
Her attitude is like that of so many Democratic lawmakers and officials. That includes California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who, along with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, violated his own mask mandate while attending the NFC championship game last month.
That also includes New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Rep. Jamaal Bowman. These adults outrageously posed in a classroom photograph, unmasked, with multiple children who were forced to keep their masks on.
The data already show that schoolchildren, even unvaccinated ones, are at significantly lower risk from the coronavirus than fully vaccinated adults. The requirement that children wear masks is just outright anti-science — a clear example of the unfortunate phenomenon of “safetyism.”
At this point, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitting that masks don’t work particularly well for anyone in arresting the spread of the coronavirus, it is especially senseless to make children wear them when they are far less likely to contract, spread, or suffer severe illness due to the virus.
The examples above only scratch the surface of pandemic-era mask hypocrisy by Democratic officials. But based on the nearly religious zeal of the left-wing base for empty shows of pandemic obedience, it has to take some courage for officials such as Murphy and Carney to do even the very little they have done. Hopefully, their willingness to do what’s right will force other Democrats to follow their example. But we doubt it.
In the meantime, voters who enjoy being bossed around by hypocritical ignoramuses on ineffective, empty pandemic safety measures ought to vote for the Democrats this fall. Everyone else should consider an alternative.
