With some school systems reinstituting mask mandates, some wonder: Is the explanation stupidity or sociopathy? After all, even CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen, once a fierce advocate of socially penalizing the “unvaxxed” and of masking schoolchildren, changed her tune this summer on the latter — after the practice harmed her own little son’s “language development.”
But the house that fell on her hasn’t impressed Philadelphia’s city fathers. One might assume these officials would focus on fighting crime, since young men in the “City of Brotherly Love’s” most violent zip code are almost twice as likely to be shot to death as soldiers in Afghanistan were. Instead, they’ve busied themselves mandating that Philly’s schoolkids must wear masks for 10 days upon their Christmas break return. It brings to mind comedian W.C. Fields’s old crack about a Philadelphia existence being only slightly preferable to death.
Going one better (as in worse), Passaic County in New Jersey had a school mask mandate take effect last week, citing high levels of community China virus transmission. Interestingly, this “threat” didn’t seem to faze Passaic’s teachers at their holiday party just days before (image below).
As the first commenter under the above tweet put it, “This isn’t a good look @PassaicSchools.”
Even more aghast was the Washington Examiner’s Zachary Faria, who called the Mask Empire’s school resurgence a “despicable crusade against children being able to live normal lives in the name of COVID safetyism.”
“All of this is not just pointless. It is gross. It is incomprehensibly cruel,” he later added, writing last week. “Even if you lived under a rock for the entire pandemic, you would know that children are not at serious risk from COVID and never have been. You would know that masking children isn’t going to protect them, nor will it protect anyone else…. There is no justification for forcibly masking children again. Yet they are doing it anyway.”
In reality, children are at virtually no risk. Just consider a study in Germany, released late last year, that had evaluated the first 15 months of the “pandemic” — the period during which the China virus was at its most deadly. The result?
In the densely populated country of 83 million, not even one healthy child aged 5 through 18 died of COVID-19. Zero, zilch, nada.
But this reality has been understood by those with open eyes since the very beginning. Remember, data out of Italy at the pandemic’s start, early 2020, showed that the average age of COVID mortality victims was 79.5 and that 99-plus percent had comorbidities. As Faria put it, “It has been 33 months since the pandemic began in the U.S. and approximately 32 months since it became clear that children were never at serious risk from the virus.”
Nonetheless, instead of focusing on protecting the elderly, the powers-that-be played the sky-is-falling Chicken Little, tormented all and sundry with COVID restrictions — and then sometimes put SARS-CoV-2-positive patients in nursing homes, killing untold numbers of seniors (all while forbidding their families from visiting them for fear of virus transmission).
So it was the Keystone Cops version of pandemic management, with the Mask Empire obsession a prime example. In reality, there “is no definitive evidence that mask mandates even work to prevent the transmission of COVID,” Faria also writes. “On the other hand, there is ample evidence that any and all restrictions on children in schools or any other area of life are ‘obsolete,’ in the words of Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist and Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. And yet the ghouls who make decisions for schools in Philadelphia and Passaic are punishing children anyway, for what? To make some hypochondriac liberals feel better?”
Yet mask mandates aren’t just obsolete. In fact, here’s what the aforementioned Dr. Leana Wen would have known, and why she might not have hurt her son, if she’d been reading The New American regularly. As I wrote in 2021:
“[S]tudies have found that masks become as pathogen-laden Petri dishes on people’s faces, can restrict oxygen intake and induce dangerously high carbon dioxide levels in people’s bloodstreams, may introduce unhealthful plastic microparticles into wearer’s systems, can cause skin problems, may exacerbate anxiety and breathing difficulties in children, and can lead to altered facial development in kids due to continuous mouth-breathing.”
And in 2020, TNA ran the piece, “What Fate Awaits the COVID Kids, a Generation Raised in Isolation and Fear?”
Faria attributes the resurgent masking efforts to cruelty and rules out “pandemic amnesty.” While the latter must be beyond consideration, we should be mindful of the saying, “Never attribute to malice what is better explained by stupidity.”
Given the very human tendency to project our mindsets onto others, it’s very easy for engaged, informed people to forget that most other Americans are anything but. Coming to mind is how officials at a N.J. school a child close to me was attending years back didn’t even know that “Kwanzaa” is a faux holiday invented by a felonious criminal in 1966. (Upon being apprised of this, the school stopped recognizing the “holiday.”) These were “educators,” too.
Of course, there certainly were demagogues who leveraged the pandemic for power. But the point is that if there weren’t true believers, the world’s Leana Wens (and she’s far from alone) wouldn’t have hurt themselves and/or their loved ones with callow COVIDian craziness.
This said, a doctor who harms a patient doesn’t escape malpractice charges just because he had no ill will. Imposing school mask mandates smacks of, in the least, criminal negligence. And tolerated fatal stupidity will kill a civilization.
