Why Wouldn’t You Want Your School-Aged Child to Wear a Mask?
Masking Up at San Diego Unified Draws Outrage from the Usual Suspects
COVID has moved from being a pandemic to being endemic. We’ve been at this so long that it’s difficult to muster the level of distress that was common over the past couple of years. Life goes on, and there are attempts to restore “normalcy” in parts of the economy and society.
Unfortunately, the virus and its mutants didn’t get the memo.
Via Inewsource:
San Diego County has been moved into the high-risk level for COVID-19 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as confirmed case numbers have continued to increase over the last few weeks, which has experts worried about the risk for severe outcomes as a result of infection …
…Post-COVID conditions, or long COVID, have been the subject of growing concern surrounding the impact that infection has on a person after recovery, as nearly one in five individuals who have been previously infected with the coronavirus have experienced prolonged conditions.
The concern about after effects stemming from COVID infections gives lie to the common assertion that older adults are those most endangered.
A CDC study found that younger adults have a greater likelihood of developing long-lasting conditions, with those in age groups between 18 and 59 seeing nearly three times as many people with long COVID after infection than those above the age of 80.
In response to the increased rate of COVID infections, the San Diego Unified School District reinstated its mask mandate for students, which had been discontinued earlier this year in the face of falling case numbers.
According to a SDUSD press release:
“We will continue to monitor the COVID-19 community level according to the CDC and County data and we will communicate if there are any changes in two weeks. If your student is participating in summer school or other summer enrichment program, please send them to school or their program with a mask. If they do not have one, masks will be provided. Students and staff will be required to wear their masks while indoors only.”
San Diego Unified Board President Sharon Whitehurst-Payne went into the lion’s den at KUSI-TV, saying students can come to school masked or stay home and use Zoom online school. She pushed back hard at the usual whining about students being uncomfortable wearing the mask during class, saying they should “just wear the mask.”
Cue the outrage. KUSI brought out Carl DeMaio, and I’ll spare you the video.
Fox News was all over it, featuring the story on Fox and Friends. KUSI rebroadcast Fox’ Laura Ingraham, interviewing a Los Angeles ophthalmologist as a mask expert, and calling out Sharon Whitehurst-Payne, as a "complete moron" and "total fraud."
I’d be willing to bet the farm that Whitehurst-Payne is getting death threats by the dozen, because that’s what getting called out on Fox News gets you these days.
It must make them so proud.
Jumping into the fray was "Let Them Breathe" founder Sharon McKeeman claiming parents were “outraged” and ready to run for school board seats. (It’s too late in most jurisdictions to run for office, but, whatever.)
She brought her coterie of a dozen or so “outraged” parents together for a press conference, promising legal action.
McKeeman has already filed to run for school board in Carlsbad, which doesn’t require masks, but does recommend that they be worn indoors. Anti-masker Becca Williams is running for San Diego Unified School Board; she qualified for the general election, running 13 points behind community activist Cody Petterson.
Amy Reichart, who’s also been a regular COVID-denier on KUSI, is running against County Supervisor National Fletcher, who beat her like a cheap rug (better than 2 to 1) in the primary. So much for popular support.
A big part of the outraged parents routine is the repetition of misleading information, sourced from less-than-reputable research.
From the Union-Tribune:
Let Them Breathe argues that masks do not prevent the coronavirus from spreading in schools and that masks harm children’s social and academic development by making it harder for them to communicate. The group has also argued that widespread infections in children and vaccinations in adults have rendered mask mandates unnecessary.
Many studies have found COVID rates are lower in schools with mask mandates than in those without, and people do get reinfected with the virus that causes COVID-19. Although immunity from prior infection appears to offer some protection against severe disease, it offers limited protection against future infection, [Dr. Howard Taras, who is San Diego Unified’s in-house physician and a UC San Diego pediatrician said.] He noted that even mild infections will keep kids out of school and cost them in-person learning time.
Just to be clear on the masking question, there is ambivalence on the topic by scientists, mostly because it’s difficult to set up rigorous studies. But the bottom line, despite the uncertainty about methodology, is that masks work. And they work better when everybody wears one indoors.
Yes, there are those who claim otherwise. Look behind the veil of their certainty and you’ll find connections to questionable institutions and foundations representing the interests of far-right funders.
Just so you know, here is some research and information from reputable organizations:
The National Center for Biotechnology Information (Over 100 references concerning mask efficacy)
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Innovations for Poverty Action (Large scale randomized controlled trial)
What the anti-maskers and their friends on the MAGA right (there’s always a connection) are up to with their newfound scientific expertise (backed by the flakiest experts money can buy), is the sowing of doubt.
It’s a well-worn technique in the corporate world, having been used by big tobacco and oil companies, among others.
These days, denigrating institutions is an essential part of the libertarian/far right’s strategy to undermine public confidence is the basic tenets of democratic governance.
Delve deeply into the world of “outraged parents” and you’ll find the Betsy DeVos school vouchers crowd, who are otherwise occupied with banning books, revising history, and taking the “woke” ideology out of math courses.
In their minds public schools, as a core element of little “d” democracy, are an institution that needs to be dismantled, starting with the teacher’s unions and ending with that pesky notion of minorities sitting in the same classroom with white students.
The Harvard Law Review (pages 23-106) has a detailed study of this process during the Trump administration, comparing it to the rise of other authoritarian states around the world.
The long view (pre-Tea Party nihilism) of this process necessitates looking back to 1972, when a future Supreme Court Justice whipped up his vision for the future:
Here’s Richard Roberts at Medium, who goes on to argue that similar visioning for the good guys is needed to make for a better future:
Fifty years ago, an American lawyer called Lewis Powell Jr. wrote a memo for the US Chamber of Commerce that deserves to be better remembered than it is. It was to become the blueprint for a “hostile takeover” of US economic and political life by a wealthy, conservative elite.
Fifty years on, the threats to America’s “free enterprise system” that worried Powell — high taxes, government regulation and a powerful labour movement — have been well and truly defanged. In no small part, this is a result of the way that the strategy Powell set out in his 1971 memo was operationalised by its most influential reader: Charles Koch, CEO (then and now) of Koch Industries, America’s largest privately-owned company.
Over the intervening decades, Koch (along with a handful of other hyper-wealthy Americans) has funded and organised a campaign to (in the words of one historian) ‘save capitalism from democracy — permanently.’ That campaign, as Powell recommended, has been waged on multiple fronts: in academia, the media, politics and the judiciary. Its success has relied on a near-perfect alignment of ideology and self-interest — and a ruthless persistence on Koch’s part.
I would argue that the denigrating of our institutions is leading us as a nation to the point where the idea of autocracy will become central to our politics. The campaigns of the anti-maskers are more about concerns over *wokeness* than they are about seeing to it that schools and local governments function properly. Checks and balances to them are just old fashioned ideas to be discarded in favor of mob rule.
**The term wokeness is doing a lot of work to disguise the real agendas at play here. In Texas it means redefining slavery as involuntary relocation in history books. In Ohio, it means teaching both sides of the holocaust. In Florida, it means rewriting math courses to sanitize the language used in examples.**
In the anti-masker movement I see a self-centered type of nihilism replacing the drive to do the work that democracy requires. For too many people it would be easier to have a “traditionalist” (as in ‘make America great again’) strongman dictate policy.
Venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who once argued that “I no longer think that freedom and democracy are compatible” is the new money machine behind fringe candidates with no empathy who espouse tales of conspiracy aimed at encouraging threats and violence.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), a critic of “woke capitalism,” has argued that the idea that a person should be free to “define your own values” is a kind of “heresy.”
The anti-mask/anti-vaxx movement is morphing into something even more horrifying; there are moves to eliminate all vaccination requirements for school children.
Let’s hear it for smallpox and polio!
Getting back to the question of masking, I hear people who think I’m “taking away” their choice when I ask them to wear a mask. I get it; it’s inconvenient and awkward at times.
Their freedom requires a rejection of common sense measures (including vaccination) that have historically saved lives and allowed society to function.
The concept of “taking away” is key to manipulating people into doing things that otherwise would be considered anti-social.
They don’t seem to understand or care that by being so one-sided in their thought process, they could be taking away my right to life.
Where has the pride in doing something for the common good gone?
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@gmail.com