Act now to stop the return of mask mandates
Washington Examiner
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We regret to inform you that the Democrats are at it again.
An elementary school in Montgomery County, Maryland, sent a note in early September telling parents that all children in one class would be required to wear a mask indefinitely because three tested positive for COVID-19.
DEMOCRAT DEFICITS COULD DOOM ECONOMY
Don’t be fooled into thinking this is a one-off. If schools start requiring masks for tiny outbreaks (of a virus against which children were safe even before the entire population acquired immunity and had access to vaccines) then we can expect rolling mask mandates, not only for COVID-19, but for cold and flu season.
Like a virus, mask mandates will spread if not contained. The mandarins of Montgomery County, a wealthy suburb of D.C., consider themselves the advanced guard of “progressive” governance. The school district was among the most locked-down, distanced, and masked in America, with the strictest quarantine rules outside Australia.
If MoCo restores mandates, others will follow. Already, there are mandate outbreaks elsewhere.
Dillard University in New Orleans and Morris Brown College in Atlanta have both mandated masks early in the academic year. For good measure, President Joe Biden is masking up again, although inconsistently, as you’d expect from a chief executive who has lost the plot.
This absurd and unfounded trend must be stopped.
Mask mandates do not curb the spread of COVID-19 to any meaningful degree. Yes, well-fitted, high-quality masks worn consistently and properly can limit the spread of respiratory viruses, but that doesn’t mean mandating them does any good or that they don’t cause concomitant harm. The preponderance of research on mandates has failed to show any good effect, especially among school children.
We know that politicians didn’t really believe masks mattered, because those who supported or imposed them also flouted them. The photo of a smiling, maskless Stacy Abrams posing before young, masked school children ought to have permanently ended mandates in schools.
Meanwhile, there’s plenty of reason to think mask mandates harm children and communities. Learning speech and reading requires teachers and students to see one another’s faces. Masks also anonymize everyone in classrooms, hallways, and sidewalks, and thus exacerbate loneliness and alienation that plague our country, and produce more of the anti-social behavior that is behind youth crime waves in places such as Washington, D.C., and Montgomery Country.
State legislators, and county and city councils, ought to act now to protect school children. Just as Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) banned mask mandates during the pandemic, more states and localities ought to preemptively ban them today.
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In the spring of 2020, it was sensible to let local governments decide on COVID-19 mitigation measures. We knew little about the virus, how it would affect children, or how it spread. Now we know much more.
A mask mandate has no scientific justification, and so it is nothing more than a harmful expansion of government power and an unwarranted intrusion on individual liberty. One of the fundamental purposes of government is to protect children. As more school districts consider forcing children into masks for seven hours a day, statesmen should act quickly to protect them — before these mandates become endemic.