New York may be our country’s least-free state according to research, but even its residents have their limits. Governor Kathy Hochul, the Empire State’s would-be empress and unelected and uninspiring chief executive, may be learning this the hard way, too. For after issuing her state’s toughest mask mandate yet, countless New Yorkers and various counties are vowing not to comply.
As the New York Post reports:
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s sudden mask-at-your-desk mandate sparked outrage in New York City as it went into effect Monday despite the Big Apple having some of the lowest rates of COVID-19 and highest rates of vaccination in the nation.
The new statewide rules, put into effect largely to stem the tide of a surge in cases upstate, where vaccination rates are poor, went into effect just three days after she announced the order [Friday] for all businesses that don’t require their workers, customers or visitors to present proof of vaccination against COVID-19.
One Manhattan hedge fund manager called Hochul’s order — which at first was met with confusion about whether it applied to offices as well as retail and service businesses — “shortsighted, in that people were told they have to get a vaccine.”
“These mask mandates hinder the desire people have to get back to the office and further delay the revitalization of Midtown and downtown office life,” the financier said.
“If people want to wear masks, they can wear masks, but we have to let individuals make their own risk-taking decisions and stop making those decisions on their behalf.”
The hedge funder added: “And that might be necessary at the beginning of a pandemic — but two years later, it reeks of authoritarianism.”
Actually, it reeked of authoritarianism (when it wasn’t stupidity) early on.
Of course, Hochul’s mandate’s ostensible justification is the Omicron coronavirus variant. Yet despite the pathogen’s worldwide spread, just one person has died of it during the last month as of this writing. During the same period, approximately 160 people worldwide were killed by lightning. Is Hochul going to mandate that everyone must stay in a grounded structure 24/7?
The one Omicron death (assuming that was the cause) was in Britain. NY has no deaths and only 38 cases thus far among its population of 20.22 million. Just today, however, a state resident not far from me was killed by a falling tree. Will Hochul issue a tree-social-distancing mandate?
Moreover, despite NYC’s population density, the metropolis is “currently only registering an infection rate of 2.7%[,] and just 28 cases of Omicron have shown up,” writes HotAir’s Jazz Shaw. “The upstate region isn’t doing as well, but most of those lower population density areas are still staying in the 4 to 4.5 percent range.”
Yet even this is deceptive. Upstate NY is rural, and almost half its counties have had zero SARS-CoV-2 deaths during the past week — that’s considering all variants. This is the point, too: Media love talking about “cases” to stoke fear, but it’s only hospitalization and death rates that matter. After all, many infected people have mild symptoms or none whatsoever (this is true with perhaps all viruses).
As for the virus of Hochul authoritarianism, Shaw writes:
Whether it’s in the city or upstate, it’s unclear how Hochul plans to enforce this and prosecute companies that refuse to go along with it. The NYPD has already repeatedly stated that they have no intention of becoming “the mask and vaccination police.” I’m sure there will be some number of “Karens” out there who are willing to drop a dime on their bosses, but the government still has to find someone to go out to the office in question, investigate, and issue a citation.
Compliance in the more conservative upstate region is going to be even tougher to achieve. I’ve been monitoring the local news outlets in the region for a couple of days and the County Executives in at least a dozen mid-state counties have already gone on the record saying they will not enforce this mandate. The local police department spokespeople don’t sound any more interested in handing out tickets than the NYPD is.
That’s called nullification — and it’s beautiful.
This is where I might normally start writing about studies showing that China virus restrictions, including mask mandates, don’t limit the pathogen’s spread and that masks actually harm people’s health. But loyal readers must be as tired of hearing about that as I am of writing about it. And, clearly, if the relation of facts were going to sway the pseudo-elites, it would have done so already because we in the sane media have been doing so ad nauseam.
Rather, what we’re confronted with is irrational (except, perhaps, among the more Machiavellian, and Hochul is pretty dull). At risk of seeming frivolous with a popular culture reference, it reminds me of an old Star Trek episode titled “The Doomsday Machine,” a favorite of us boys in sixth grade.
In it, a mentally wavering commodore takes command of the star ship Enterprise and insists on attacking a massive, impenetrable, planet-destroying robot ship even though it’s a fruitless suicide mission of the type that had destroyed his own vessel. The Vulcan Mr. Spock character intervened, compelling the commodore to relinquish command by pointing out that, under regulations, psychological unfitness was cause for removing a superior from power — and suicidal irrationality reflected psychological unfitness.
At least the commodore, however, was facing a true doomsday machine. The world’s Hochul’s are playing doomsday make-believe with an increasingly less virulent disease — and are playing with people’s lives. In a more rational world, they’d be arrested for criminal negligence.
