It’s time for public officials like Gov. JB Pritzker to check the political winds on their COVID policies. They may cling to their version of science, but the politics have shifted against them, even within their own party. They are rapidly being left behind, putting Illinois and a few other states in outlier status on COVID policy, particularly for children.
That’s not a conservative assessment. It’s from a rapidly growing number of voices on the left now recognizing that their own ranks have had it wrong on both the science and the politics of harsh mandates, particularly those imposed on children, especially masking requirements.
“The warning signs for Democrats are manifest,” wrote the left’s New York Times last week, pushing the party to “search for a new message on the virus.” The Times went on:
The shift reflects a potential change in the nature of the threat now that millions of Americans are vaccinated and Omicron appears to be causing less serious disease. But it is also a political pivot. Democrats are keenly aware that Americans — including even some of the party’s loyal liberal voters — have changed their attitudes about the virus….
As examples they cited Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, who has no plans for mask mandates because Pennsylvanians, the governor said, crave a return to normalcy. “I think everybody’s angry,” Wolf said.
The Times also cited Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis who “has been unusually blunt in saying that it is time to treat the coronavirus as a manageable disruption, more like the flu. Last month he told Coloradans that if they were unvaccinated and wound up in the hospital, it was their ‘own darn fault.’ Regarding masks, he said that state health authorities had no business telling people ‘what to wear.’”
The Atlantic, also on the left, firmly made “The Case Against Masks at School,” as their headline last week read. They reviewed “a variety of studies…to try to find evidence that would justify the CDC’s no-end-in-sight mask guidance for the very-low-risk pediatric population, particularly post-vaccination.”
Their conclusion: “We came up empty-handed.” The Atlantic even labeled establishment masking policies as “mythology”:
Over the past 21 months, slowly and with much resistance, the layers of mythology around COVID-19 mitigation in schools have been peeled away, each time without producing the much-ballyhooed increases in COVID-19. Schools did not become hot spots when they reopened, nor when they reduced physical distancing, nor when they eliminated deep-cleaning protocols. These layers were peeled away because the evidence supporting them was weak, and they all had substantial downsides for children’s education and health.
Even far left National Public Radio joined the chorus last week. NPR suppresses criticism of government orthodoxy as egregiously as any media, but their headline admitted the mistake on masks — “After 2 years, growing calls to take masks off children in school.”
They ticked off the list of reasons why those calls are rising – calls long expressed by experts NPR has ignored: Masks that actually work are hard to find; it’s hard for children to wear masks properly; masks can interfere with young children’s brain development; masks can make it harder to hear and understand speech; and masks can inhibit social interactions.
For those reasons, Illinois and a few other states and cities that stick with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control are already outliers, nationally and internationally. Just 16 states now maintain mask requirement for school children regardless of vaccination status. Internationally, as The Atlantic wrote,
The U.K., Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and others—have not taken the U.S.’.s approach, and instead follow World Health Organization guidelines, which recommend against masking children ages 5 and younger, because this age group is at low risk of illness, because masks are not “in the overall interest of the child,” and because many children are unable to wear masks properly. Even for children ages 6 to 11, the WHO does not routinely recommend masks, because of the “potential impact of wearing a mask on learning and psychosocial development.” The WHO also explicitly counsels against masking children during physical activities, including running and jumping at the playground, so as not to compromise breathing.
But most Illinois schools have been coerced into following the state’s guidance, which in turn follows the CDC, requiring masking on all kids from pre-school through high school.
That’s part of why a recent grading of governors’ COVID policies by the Brownstone Institute ranked Pritzker a “complete fail” – worse than an ‘F.’ The state’s detachment from the norm, even the blue state norm, will only grow.
The better reason for dropping school masking requirement isn’t politics, of course. It’s that masks on kids are harmful and have little or no effect protecting kids or reducing transmission, which the articles cited above document. More than 150 studies show mask ineffectiveness and harm.
We have long known that the risk to children from COVID is miniscule, comparable to ordinary flu. But they have been masked in schools to protect adults, based on the claim that masking at school reduces transmission. That claim, too, is now discredited.
That means masks for school children have been nothing more than a cowardly and misdirected effort by adults to use children as their shields. The story is much the same on COVID vaccines for kids. If that’s not enough for Pritzker and other politicians, let’s hope they see the political consequences.