Or maybe you will. Read on, and find out. The mass psychosis will not end until the superstitious neurotics are affirmatively defeated, which is why Gov. Glenn Youngkin's fight in Virginia is so important. More on that in a moment, but first, the latest out of Los Angeles -- home to some of the most insane, anti-science 'COVID' overreach in the country: Well over a year of school closures. Ludicrous and politicized demands from the local teachers union. Allegations (not denied) of kids being vaccinated in school without parental knowledge. And now, an unhinged new masking policy:
Starting Monday, students must wear “well-fitted, non-cloth masks with a nose wire” at all times, including outdoors, the district announced. https://t.co/hH2UzmCdFI
— KTVU (@KTVU) January 24, 2022
The Los Angeles Unified School District said it will prohibit students from wearing cloth masks as the highly transmissible omicron variant of COVID-19 continues to spread. Starting Monday, students must wear "well-fitted, non-cloth masks with a nose wire" at all times, including outdoors, the district announced...The shift away from cloth masks was prompted by guidance from Los Angeles County health authorities, said Shannon Haber, a spokeswoman for LAUSD.
Kids are at extraordinarily, gloriously low risk of suffering from severe COVID. Many more children have died in car wrecks or drowning accidents than have died of the virus during the pandemic. Among children, the COVID death rate is similar to that of (or less than) the flu -- a rate that is also extremely low. And we've known for the better part of two years that the safest place to be, in terms of COVID transmission, is outdoors. And yet, based on "guidance" from "health authorities," Los Angeles schools will force nearly every single child in their government system to wear fitted medical masks, including while they're outdoors. Lunacy. Student masking does not slow the spread of the virus -- and schools (including maskless/mask-optional ones) have been some of the safest places from the virus, anywhere. Students and staff are at lower risk of contracting COVID inside schools than out in the wider community. There is a huge amount of data on this, and studies purporting to show the opposite have been exposed as shoddy and fatally flawed. There are known harms associated with forced masking of kids. Even this cautious viral immunologist is now recommending the practice of mandating masks in schools be ended:
Student masking: when an intervention's real-world benefits are too small to measure, we should feel comfortable ending its use. Acknowledging that dropping masks is a big shift for many, we call for a change to mask-optional everywhere no later than Feb 15th. pic.twitter.com/o3BlFgtefh
— Scott J Balsitis (@DrScottBalsitis) January 25, 2022
Los Angeles' reaction is, more child masking. Harder. Even outdoors. It's deranged. So are requirements like these, from other blue cities in blue states on the other side of the country:
The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra announced on Monday that children over the age of 5 will need to show proof of vaccination to attend performances at Kleinhans Music Hall. This requirement will go into effect on Monday, Jan. 24. https://t.co/2Kxc5o7VtO
— WGRZ (@WGRZ) January 24, 2022
The Wells Fargo Center will soon require fans and staff to provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test for upcoming Philadelphia 76ers and Philadelphia Flyers games under Philadelphia's newest indoor dining mandate...The mandate, which applies to all indoor establishments that serve food or drink for on-site consumption, will go into effect on Jan. 3. For the first two weeks, establishments will be permitted to accept proof of a negative COVID-19 test from within 24 hours as an alternative to vaccination proof. After Jan. 17, all staff and visitors will need to provide proof of vaccination...Staff members and children ages five to 11 have until early February to be fully vaccinated.
Even vehement vaccine advocates in the medical community have argued that child COVID vaccinations should not be mandatory. This is an excellent summary of the trade-offs parents and doctors should consider in each individual case. But heavy-handed government bureaucrats and paranoid leftists are now forcing parents to inject their 6-year-olds with these shots if they want to hear classical music performed, or watch a hockey game. In Minneapolis, this is being extended to dining in restaurants (also with a negative test option). This is all deeply unscientific and indefensible. Mary Katharine Ham has heard enough of the "kids are resilient" spin:
Nearly every day, I feel that familiar frisson of anxiety—a tightening in my stomach when my 6-year-old wants a skateboard, a jump in my heart rate when my 8-year-old asks to go sledding—but that feeling isn’t a reliable gauge of risk to my children. A quick search of CDC data suggests that skateboarding causes fewer injuries than trips to the playground or playing soccer do, which I let my kids do without thinking twice. I thank my adrenaline-pumping amygdala for its work and pass the baton to my more rational neocortex on parenting decisions. Tolerating risk for my kids is tough, but vital, so I practice...A one-size-fits-all approach to risk, and top-down encouragement to take as few risks as possible, may have been reasonable in 2020, before we properly understood how the coronavirus was transmitted and before we had vaccines. Spurning risk analysis made us all worse at it, however, and children have paid the highest price.
...As David Leonhardt wrote in The New York Times, we’ve inflicted “more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults.” You don’t have to be a psychologist to see something wrong with that exchange. In our focus on one threat, we’ve let a thousand others flourish: learning loss, destabilization of the public-school system due to under-enrollment, self-harm, behavioral problems. The major metropolitan areas of the United States were a global outlier in 2020 and 2021 for extended school closures. (Schools were largely open in Europe and Scandinavia and many other spots in the U.S.) ...“Kids are resilient” has been a refrain of the pandemic, used to justify the removal of regular school, birthday parties, and talking with friends at lunch. But it’s not a kid’s job to be resilient. It’s a parent’s job to be resilient for them, to spare them from our fears and worries. The longer we abdicate, the more damage we will do.
Which brings us back to Virginia, where the vast majority of counties and districts are complying with Youngkin's 'school mask optional' executive order. Even some deep blue areas have announced a rapid phase-out. But there are outliers, run by the hardest-core leftists in the state, and they're resisting -- relying on a law passed last year requiring districts to follow CDC guidance to the greatest extent possible (all of these districts are ignoring some CDC COVID guidance already, but they're clinging to the masking recommendation for the purposes of this political battle). This is what they're doing to non-compliant students. There's an open dispute, already in the courts, about whether the governor's order can supersede this particular statute, but that debate may become moot very soon:
The Virginia legislature could simply repeal or amend last year’s law to make masking optional — if it can find the votes, which, it appeared, it couldn’t. Republicans hold the governor’s office, of course, and a majority in the lower house of the state legislature. But Democrats enjoy a 21-19 advantage in the state senate. That means the GOP is block…unless one of those 21 Democrats is willing to vote with Republicans to change the current law. That would force a 20-20 split on the issue, with new Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears acting as the tiebreaker...On Monday, Chap Peterson, a moderate Democrat who joined with Republicans to force school re-opening last year, said in an email to the Fairfax County Parents Association that Fairfax’s school board “must define an ‘off ramp’ for mandatory masking. That means plainly stated metrics as well as a final deadline (e.g. Valentine’s Day). They should announce that immediately. The forced masking policy is going to end very soon, i.e. in a few weeks. Otherwise, the General Assembly will again step in. IT IS NOT AN ACCEPTABLE LONG-TERM SOLUTION.”
Falls Church city is already throwing in the towel. Do Virginia's Senate Democrats want to go on record to vote that masks must remain required in districts that decide to defy Youngkin? With Omicron cases plunging and public opinion moving? Maybe these blue counties are filled with dead-enders who will fight for COVID restrictions for months on end. Or maybe they'll see the writing on the wall and start their phase-outs to avoid what could wind up being a huge political win for Youngkin, and an embarrassment for their fellow Democrats. Remember: These protocols and legal challenges aren't actually about kids' safety or health. They're about tunnel-vision culture war fights from partisan obsessives, fixated on control. That politicized single-mindedness may shift the calculus on whether this is a fight worth having anymore. Then again, they're dug in, and the prospect of losing in humiliating manner doesn't seem to dissuade angry leftists from performative tantrums these days. Finally, because California is always the worst, I'll leave you with this. Contempt for parents has become a staple of progressive ideology, and the only thing that might reverse this trend is another painful walloping at the polls in November:
Under a bill introduced today by a California lawmaker, children 12 and older in the state would be permitted to get vaccinated — including against COVID-19 — without their parents’ consent or knowledge https://t.co/oEgHCQvaSc
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) January 21, 2022