President Joe Biden’s Education Department recently announced that they would be launching a civil rights investigation into 5 GOP-led states that banned schools from imposing mask mandates. They claimed that the ban would discriminate against students with disabilities or health problems. Nobody is stopping kids from being sent to school with a mask. They are simply blocking the state from forcing kids to have to wear one. Gotta love the Democrat logic where you can take off your mask when you sit down at a restaurant but kids have to wear masks when they sit down at their desk.
Education chiefs in Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah have been fighting the Biden Administration’s plan to butt into the health decisions of kids over the rights of the parents. Carly Atchison, communications director for Gov. Kevin Stitt, said President Biden shouldn’t spend a single second harassing state on health decisions “until every American citizen is safely out of Afghanistan.”
It has been a nonstop battlefield between school, state, and the Biden Administration. Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt said that forcing children to wear masks in the classroom all day “flies in the face of science.” He cited the low risk of severe illness and death, as well as their low risk of transmission. He also talked about how forcing children to wear masks all day hinders critical development in facial cues and expressions, especially in young children.
There’s still no evidence that the store-bought masks and every other cloth mask on the market are actually effective in any shape or form. Only the N95 is rated to block the droplets carrying the virus, not the virus-sized particles.
The investigation will determine whether or not the statewide prohibitions “heighten the risk” for severe illness from developing COVID-19. U.S Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona called it “unacceptable” for state leaders to put politics over the health and education of the students they took an oath to serve. He claimed that the Department will protect every student’s right to learn safely and put into place the policies that allow them to return to the classroom full-time this fall.
President Biden has gone so far as to threaten civil rights lawsuits against the bans, accusing the GOP politicians of turning public safety measures into political disputes for their own gain. He said he will not let his administration sit by as governors try to “block and intimidate educators protecting our children.”
Yet President Biden seems to ignore one of the largest scaled studies of COVID-19 transmission in American schools which studied distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and mask mandates. The study covered more than 90,000 elementary-school students in 169 Georgia schools from Nov. 16 – Dec. 11. Vinay Prasad, an associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, found that masking requirements failed to show any independent benefits.
Other countries such as the U.K, Ireland, Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy have all exempted kids from wearing masks at school. There is not any evidence of more outbreaks in these schools relative to schools within the U.S. and many experts also revealed that the developing Delta Variant shouldn’t change our thinking on mask mandates in schools.
But the CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics seemed to bypass the science of COVID-19 in the classroom with their own updated guidance. On July 9, the CDC recommended mask-wearing indoors for all individuals (age 2 and older) who are not fully vaccinated. Ten days later, the American Academy of Pediatrics took it to the extreme and said that everyone over the age of 2 should wear a mask, regardless of vaccination status. The CDC later mirrored that same guidance.
The biggest problem we are dealing with is unbiased data. The government only finds the data they want to see. They never present mask studies alone. It’s always “in conjunction with social distancing” or some other measures. If masks worked, the pandemic would be over. We would’ve “flattened the curve” by now.
The vaccines don’t work, the masks don’t work, what’s next?
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