There will very soon come a time in this miserably long pandemic where the only sizable group left wearing masks by order of the government will be the cohort threatened the least by COVID-19 — school-aged kids. And for this anti-science, anti-education, anti-childhood-development outrage we have one person above all to blame: American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.
During an MSNBC interview Tuesday, Weingarten tried to sustain the gaslighting fiction that she is “in favor of an off-ramp on masks” in schools, while contradicting that claim in the very same paragraph.
“The real issue becomes . . . is the spread low enough so that there’s no dissemination or transmission in schools,” the union chief said. “That’s why I like what Massachusetts has done, because what they’ve said is that on a school-by-school basis, if there’s an 80% vaccination rate, then those schools can lift the mask mandates.”
Poor Randi: Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker Wednesday pulled the rug right out under her arbitrarily and unreachably high vaccination standard (recall that the vax percentage for 12- to 17-year-olds is still just 56% nationwide) by announcing the removal of the state masking mandate altogether.
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. 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. 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.
New York, California and Delaware — three states where teachers unions are especially powerful — are extending the kiddie mandates long after the exponentially more at-risk adults are free to do what they please. This is the exact opposite order such liberations should go.
People under the age of 18 comprise 22.1% of the US population, yet not even 0.1% of the COVID-19 deaths. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fewer kids 5-17 have died from the coronavirus (497) than have died from pneumonia (618).Thanks in part to Weingarten’s influence — remember, she was at the White House on day two of the Biden presidency — teachers got to the front of the line for vaccination, not that that prevented her from backing foot-dragging efforts on school-reopening by affiliated locals in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC.
Demanding that student mask mandates remain in place until their vaccination rates hit 80% raises the question: Who again are we aiming to protect? Every adult has long had access to the vaccine, the kids aren’t getting seriously ill in significant numbers, and any immunocompromised individual can use effective mask protection (unlike kids, who understandably have a hard time keeping even their less-effective masks in place all day).
Those of us parents who have chafed at living in Weingarten-dominated environments can at least enjoy the schadenfreude of her playing a central role in the current Democratic flight away from pandemic restrictions. After all, she was literally at the scene of the Dems’ biggest recent trauma — the shock loss of favorite Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe (at whose final campaign rally Weingarten spoke) to relative unknown Glenn Youngkin, who ran on parental dissatisfaction with public schools.
It’s no accident that the main driver behind the sudden Democratic push away from restrictions is a guy who almost lost the same day of the McAuliffe debacle: New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who was startled to discover that pissed-off Democratic parents were ready to vote Republican now that Donald Trump is no longer on the scene.
Weingarten’s influence may be on the wane, but it’s still evident in two places that matter: big-city school districts (which may well continue masking even after the state mandates go away) and the CDC itself. Director Rochelle Walensky, who has been successfully bullied by Weingarten in the past, insisted yet again this week that “now is not the moment” to remove mask mandates on kids as young as 2.
On behalf of those of us still living in the dwindling number of toddler-masking jurisdictions, here is my plea to enterprising mask manufacturers: Please, please personalize the last masks with the most appropriate face — that belonging to Randi Weingarten.
Matt Welch is an editor at large at Reason.