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Liberal activists may soon lose the mask war in schools.
Recently, the Department of Education in England announced a new ruling that students will no longer be required to wear face coverings in school.
“From tomorrow we will no longer require face masks in classrooms and the Department for Education will shortly remove national guidance on their use in communal areas,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson said.
“This is because the national data shows the prevalence of Covid to be on a downward trajectory,” a statement from Department for Education added.
The Ivy League school of Brown University released a study of schools in New York, Massachusetts and Florida. It did not find a correlation between student cases and mask mandates.
“Schools did not become hot spots,” according to the study. “When they reopened, nor when they reduced physical distancing, nor when they eliminated deep-cleaning protocols.”
Three public-health experts were quoted in a notable piece in The Atlantic, which brutally eviscerated mask mandates.
Evidence suggests there are substantial downsides for children’s education and health as a result of the overly restrictive coronavirus-related policies driven by left-wing politics.
More from NY Post:
The mask mandates aren’t as harmful as the school closures, which were a debacle, but they aren’t without cost either, especially, as The Atlantic authors note, for kids “with cognitive delays, speech and hearing issues and autism.”
The people in contemporary America who most pride themselves on their alleged commitment to science and public health are also the most superstitious and immune to evidence. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the debate over masking kids at school — an ongoing, flagrant example of collective irrationality…
The late economist Herb Stein famously said, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Well, masking can’t go on forever, but that’s not stopping its advocates, who will very likely, when all is said and done, look nearly as foolish as the fierce proponents of school closures earlier in the pandemic…
Mask mandates should join the litany of cast-aside school mitigation measures. If we are worried about the welfare of teachers, there’s nothing to stop them from getting vaccinated and boosted, and the vast majority are indeed vaccinated. Meanwhile kids are at very low risk, and parents should be free to send their children to school masked if that makes them more comfortable.
But many on the left have a deep attachment to masks that isn’t based on evidence or on a calibration of costs and benefits but an a priori commitment to them as a totem of public safety and private virtue. That this feeling is subrational makes it all the stronger. The science is beside the point, although eventually — after pro-mandate Democrats sustain more political damage — it will prevail.
