Recently, we’ve seen blue states finally start lifting COVID restrictions from schools. Last week, Delaware Gov. John Carney announced that school mask mandates would be rescinded on March 31. Ned Lamont, the governor of Connecticut, announced that the state’s school mask mandate would end on February 28. New York Governor Kathy Hochul also announced that New York’s school mask mandate would be assessed after winter break and could be lifted in early March.
I keep thinking about that viral video of elementary school kids in Nevada cheering at the news that they would no longer be required to have masks. It was a happy moment for sure, and I look forward to New York following suit (hopefully soon). Still, in our happiness at returning to normal, we can’t forget that for the majority of this pandemic, Democrats have led the fear campaign, insisting that we had to shut down, mask up, and not question the science. Red states with fewer restrictions were attacked and blamed for any spike in cases. But now it looks like the left is looking to rewrite the script, claiming the science has changed, so now it’s safe for kids to ditch the masks in school.
The science never changed—the politics did.
But as happy we are that schools will soon be returning to normal, we should never forget that they never had to be shut down in the first place—they didn’t have to mandate masks for kids or put up pointless barriers, or in some cases, force kids to eat outside in frigid temperatures.
We must also not forget that the Biden administration tightened mask guidance for schools because it caved to pressure from a prominent teachers’ union. It wasn’t science dictating the guidance; it was teachers’ unions.
This guidance never made any sense.
Dr. Anthony Fauci acknowledged early on in the pandemic that masks don’t keep out the virus. A CDC study confirmed as much when it found no difference in infection rates between schools with and without mask mandates.
So, they don’t appear to protect kids from COVID and they cause other problems, such as speech and language delays. Meanwhile, kids are also exposed to an alarming number of other dangerous pathogens that collect on those masks. Why was this necessary? What was the purpose of school mask mandates when school-age children have a COVID recovery rate of 99.997%—better than their mortality risk from the seasonal flu? Did we have kids mask up to protect them from the flu? Of course not.
It’s not like we didn’t know that kids are overwhelming safe from COVID and aren’t superspreaders. Heck, Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted this in November of 2020. This was also confirmed by studies in Switzerland and Iceland the same year. A study from Germany also found that children could act as a brake on infection. But, because of a bunch of terrified teachers, the science was ignored—fear ruled the day.
That same fear prompted countless parents to vaccinate their kids from COVID, even though it was likely completely unnecessary if their child was otherwise healthy. In fact, a study from the UK found that unvaccinated children are safer from COVID than even vaccinated adults of any age.
It’s a good thing that Democrats are finally starting to come around, but that doesn’t absolve them of their behavior over the past two years. It may be a long time before we fully understand how damaging COVID restrictions were to children, but we’ll always know who was responsible for keeping these useless mandates and restrictions in place long after we knew they weren’t solving the problem.
