In a desperate attempt to stave off, or at least mitigate, a veritable electoral bloodbath, Democrats have conveniently decided that now is the time to finally stop obsessing over COVID. Yes, now—right as other polling evinces a majority of Americans want to cease or seriously lessen COVID-induced lifestyle restrictions.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul just announced an end to the Empire State’s statewide masking requirement for businesses, although a mask mandate regrettably remains in place at schools and health care facilities. What’s more, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Oregon, and California—all of which, like New York, are Democratic-governed—announced early February 2022 their own plans to lift indoor mask mandates either later in February or in March.
These Democratic leaders have invariably pointed to receding caseloads, and perhaps “the science,” more generally, to justify their obviously coordinated reversals on mask mandates. To be sure, mask mandates (for inefficacious masks) and vaccine mandates (for vaccines that do not stop transmission) are bad public policy. So, good for Democrats for finally catching up. Welcome to the party, guys; some of us have been here for a while already.
But Democrats cannot plausibly pretend that “the science” has changed in any meaningful way. All that has changed is their ever-plummeting polling and ever-sinking expected fortunes this fall. Hochul and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have not had some sort of grand epiphany. There will be no “mea culpa,” no acknowledgment that Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had it right on COVID all along.
There will be no apologies for the ways that divisive vaccine mandates and pointless mask mandates harm our social fabric and undermine the common good. If Democrats could still politically get away with imposing their will, they would do so. It just turns out they can’t.
This section is courtesy of the Josh Hammer Epoch Times February 2022 report “Democrats’ Recent Rejection of COVID Insanity Will Not Save Them This Fall”: