Governor to keep children masked until when? To kingdom come?

While Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker will no longer require mask wearing indoors, he gave no date for when children will be allowed to attend schools without masks.

Despite his claims that we all must continue to follow the advice of scientists, doctors and epidemiologists, in fact the “science” fails to provide persuasive evidence that children must continue to be strapped into those suffocating bridles.

“Of course we still have sensitive situations of K-12 students,” he pronounced at his Wednesday afternoon press conference after freeing everyone else from the prison. A decision will come about when children can unmask, he said, “weeks hence,” whatever that means.

By delaying a date certain for children and by holding off until the end of the month for “indoor masking,” Pritzker raises the suspicion, as one reporter asked, that he’s keeping open his “options” to keeping the masking mandate.

Pritzker’s response was unpersuasive: The state’s “trajectory” is “trending down,” but we’ve got to make sure that the downward trend continues. Oh, sure. Pritzker is trying to save face as governors in blue states are eliminating their mask mandates, wanting to have it both ways: Appearing to acknowledge what has become apparent (the masks ineffective, especially for children), while staying in control.

Try as he might, the sand is shifting under his feet by a rising tide of Americans who are fed up with this nonsense and the growing appreciation of what “the science” actually says.

One possible reason springs to mind: The teachers unions

For that I turn to the Atlantic magazine, whose leftward tilt in obvious. Yascha Mounk, Associate Professor of Practice at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, makes the case in “Open Everything: The time to end pandemic restrictions is now.”

He was among the first to call for social distancing when the pandemic began and so little was known about the novel virus. But that’s changed, he argued, as vaccines have been developed, therapeutics between understood and the worst is past.

…[W]e should lift all remaining restrictions on everyday activities (which were, in any case, unable to prevent the rapid circulation of Omicron cases this winter). Children should be allowed to take off their mask in school. We should get rid of measures such as deep cleaning that are purely performative. Politicians and public-health officials should send the message that Americans should no longer limit their social activities, encouraging them to resume playdates and dinner parties without guilt.

He makes an interesting and novel point:

 …[T]he unvaccinated are, implicitly, the main justification for ongoing restrictions—in that the pro-restriction camp points to the persistently high death toll from COVID-19 and these deaths are heavily concentrated among the unvaccinated. That attitude is also wrong. We need not put our lives on hold for the indefinite future because others have decided to risk theirs. And since social restrictions are strictest in those parts of the country where most people are vaccinated, they are unlikely to help those who are most in need of protection. Wearing a mask in highly vaccinated New York does little to save an unmasked person in barely vaccinated Mississippi. [Emphasis added.]

It almost goes without saying (because it has been repeated so often), children are the least vulnerable, yet–in Pritzker’s mind at least–they are the ones who for now can’t escape the autocratic mandates.

One possible reason springs to mind: The teachers unions. Pritzker and Democrats in general are lackeys of those unions, including the Chicago Teachers Union. Those unions have been, for the most selfish of reasons, have successfully demanded that children be kept on the mask-your-face plantation.

Hence, as Prizkter says, the children will be bound up for “weeks hence”–at least to long, I should add. It’s unconscionable.

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