Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers president, appeared on CNN and expressed confusion at blue states abandoning mask mandates. Watch:
“At least seven states are ending mask mandates in schools over the next several weeks,” Alisyn Camerota said. “Two of these states, Connecticut and Massachusetts, will lift masks at the end of this month. Just today, Maryland’s governor asked the state Board of Ed. to approve lifting school mask restrictions there, and Nevada’s governor just ended his state’s mask mandate, ‘effective immediately’.”
“But the CDC says it’s still too soon,” she went on. “So what do teachers and doctors think?”
CNN might have just struck upon the problem. We shall continue.
“Randi Weingarten is the president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Dr. Ali Khan is the dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Great to see both of you. Randi, Massachusetts and Connecticut and Nevada, all lifting the masks for students and in schools. One, Nevada is today, the other two are at the end of this month. How do you feel about that? How do the teachers feel?”
This is a terrible question. A better one would be: ‘How do parents and schoolchildren ‘feel’? Camerota should be asking her to justify continuing to mask children with a reasoned defense based on science. But, this is CNN, after all.
“So, you could see why teachers and parents and others would be confused about how the CDC is saying one thing and now you have a whole second set of governors saying a whole different thing,” Weingarten complained. “What we did, frankly, is three months ago in November since we support off-ramps for masking, we know that masks impede learning.”
Eureka!
“But we also know that masks were there for the safety of our kids, our communities and ourselves,” she continued without providing any shred of scientific evidence. “So what I did was in November pre-Omicron, I asked the CDC, Dr. Walensky and Dr. Cardona, I said, could you actually give us and investigate, and figure out a science-based metric or an off-ramp for masking?”
“And did you get that?” Camerota asked.
“No, never,” she alleged.
“And the dilemma is now that today, for example — I have two op-eds on my desk,” she continued. “One that says we must unmask now, masks don’t work, and the other that says don’t do it right now. That’s why teachers and many parents are just saying to the scientists and to the government officials, let this decision be informed by science and safety, not by politics.”
This is how public policy works. The public debates it. Elected representatives decide how to act upon their constituents’ demands or inform them about the correct policy decisions they plan to make.
“And I think, I’m just going to lift up the one governor who I think is doing it absolutely the right way, was Governor Hochul in New York,” she said. It should be pointed out that Hochul has issued multiple unlawful mask mandates, as determined by a court of law. New York also has one of the worst Covid policy performances in the nation. It is now rated the worst state in America.
“She lifted the adult mask mandate effective immediately, like the Nevada governor did, but she said when it comes to, you know, students in schools and other congregate settings and transportation, she kind of listed the four or five different things that they’re looking at so that we all know it with a goal towards doing — that lifting this mandate by the end of February, beginning of March,” she went on.
“The last thing I’m going to say is this, this is good news. I know it’s confusing right now, but the good news is that Omicron is really going down, and the good news is that we have enough people vaccinated and enough people boosted that you can see a path to normalcy,” she added. “And I don’t want the lead to be kind of hidden in the midst of this confusion.”
The New York Post has dubbed Randi Weingarten Covid’s most “evil” official.
“There has been in recent days a glorious stampede away from pandemic restrictions in the very Democratic states that have always been most fond of them — California announced the end of indoor masking mandates Monday,” the Post notes. “Connecticut, Delaware, Oregon, Rhode Island and New Jersey have all scaled back restrictions over the past week. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul ditched the onerous vax-or-mask requirement on businesses Wednesday.”
“By far, the two biggest predictors of whether a given school district during the pandemic has been open or closed, masked or unmasked, have been the size of the local vote margin for or against Donald Trump and the comparative strength of teachers unions,” the Post went on. “There are 13 states that still have mask mandates for schools; all but Nevada favored Joe Biden in 2020 by at least 10 percentage points.
And as the CNN interview noted, even Nevada is abandoning the school masking mandates.
There never was any sound reasoning for the CDC’s school masking guidance. As released email chains document, the main reason the CDC actually imposed the guidance in 2021 because teacher’s unions pressured them to do it.
There is also new data from the Office for National Statistics (U.K.) that show decisively that Covid-19 was never more dangerous for young people and children than the seasonal flu.
As a graphic from the Financial Times shared on Twitter shows, Covid is 20%-30% as deadly as seasonal flu for children and young adults. Even more strikingly, the Office for National Statistics also showed that schoolchildren who “never” wear masks were less likely to test positive for Covid as classmates who “never” wore them.
The U.K.’s superior data transparency and recognition of the actual Covid science may be one reason that England ended masking for children early on in the pandemic.
Meanwhile, back in the United States, the CDC is sharing demonstrably false information on masks.
The CDC is back to lying about masks.
Let me help. This mask study has been thoroughly debunked. Low sample sizes (n=86). Self-reporting. "No statistical significance."
This is fraud.🔻 pic.twitter.com/mR8neaSTWL
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) February 8, 2022
Ian Miller rightly pointed out on his Substack column “Unmasked” that this is deliberate misinformation from the CDC. You can see clearly on the image itself “not statistically significant.” The study is just as worthless as the masks themselves.
The CDC Director Rochelle Walensky has also been called out at publications such as The Atlantic for sharing egregiously flawed studies that purport to tout the efficacy of school masking.
Randi Weingarten may claim it is all so “confusing” why blue states are looking at free states that have abandoned mandates long ago and are starting to thrive instead of plunge further into the Covid abyss. But she only has people like herself and her cohorts at the Centers for Disease Control to blame. Unlike their constant wavering on the issue according to the political winds, the science has been clear all along: The masks never worked.
NOW READ:
The CDC Director Gets Brutal Reality Check: Mask Study on Schoolchildren is Exposed as Fake
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OPINION: This article contains commentary which reflects the author's opinion.