Kendall Tietz
As Democrats change tune on mask mandates, education activists argue the policy shift is based on “political science” motivations rather than scientific evidence.
Democrat politicians’ change in tune regarding mask mandates is an attempt to help their case politically, Fight for Schools Executive Director and America First Legal Senior Adviser Ian Prior told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“When far-left politicians and their legacy media allies talked about following the data and science, what they really meant was following the polling data and the political science,” Prior said. “Parents are not going to fall for this kind of gaslighting, now or ever.”
In updated guidance published Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated its COVID-19 mask guidance which no longer recommends indoor masking in most settings.
As part of the new guidance only schools in areas deemed high risk are advised to require masks, a change that reverses previous guidance that recommended universal school masking regardless of community COVID-19 virus levels.
Governors in many blue states, such as New Mexico, New Jersey, Nevada, New York, Connecticut and Delaware all announced plans to relax mask mandates in early February before the CDC updated its guidance.
Journalists, politicians and other public figures have also blasted the shift in messaging regarding mask mandates as a move motivated by political ambitions. Many critics have highlighted the fact that mask easing has happened ahead of President Joe Biden’s Tuesday State of the Union address.
“The Science of COVID changed to perfectly coincide with polls showing rising anger over school closings and mask mandates, just in time for the months leading into the midterm elections,” journalist Glenn Greenwald said Tuesday. “The Science is the Science, but sometimes it does favors for good people.
“California, Oregon, and Washington have ended school mask mandates the day before Joe Biden’s state of the union address,” journalist Clay Travis said Monday. “They lied to you for two years about kids needing to wear masks and then abandoned them for politics. It was never about science. This was totally shameful.”
“The science hasn’t changed … We’ve known before the pandemic and even during the pandemic from the highest quality evidence from clinical trials that the mask mandates were unlikely to have any significant impact,” Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo said Monday regarding mask mandate rollbacks on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
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