Forcing children to wear a mask is child abuse. The Left failed children.

If you are

Anti muslim
Right wing maga
Anti mask
In Florida

Well ..

 

them's bold words coming from someone like you DD

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_libertarian_thinkers

 

Here's the thing. We've had students hospitalized and the family members of both students and teachers pass away from Covid19. This is since the vaccinations. There were both that happened before vaccinations and a teacher as well. An administrator was hospitalized and has long term conditions. So, yes, safety is a definite concern. Since the mandates of improved masks, we've had zero deaths, though some students have been hospitalized.

I would like for masks to not have to be mandated forever. It is difficult to hear some students and for them to hear their teachers. It is also helpful for students with Speech disabilities and English Language Learners to see the mouths of the teachers and vice versa. If something good comes out of Omicron such as greater immunity, then that's awesome.

It is not uncommon for virus mutations to become more transmittable and less deadly. That makes sense, since that helps them to survive.

I believe there is a certain amount of overkill going on with the regulations. That said, it is only a slight inconvenience to have to wear masks in order to keep people safe. It isn't traumatic for the vast majority of the children that wear them.

 

It's a moving target as there's two different distinctions between infection and hospitalization(death). Having the initial regimen (1/2 shots) greatly reduces the chances of hospitalization as it primes the immune system against a novel and unencountered type of virus.

The current growing consensus that that boosters are useful to greatly reducing infection and severity but its efficacy is only guaranteed for at least 3 months.

I've looked at reinfection rates for people "naturally" infected, and it seems to be correlated with severity (the sicker you are, the longer the immunity you get), but some studies also indicate it's as effective as a booster (at least 3 months).

So this talk of getting omicron deliberately is very risky and also predicated on moving targets and assumptions gleamed from alpha variant, which was a supposed one and done. I guess it's great for me since I went through 2 weeks of annoyance for it. What doesn't kill me makes me stronger yadda yadda...but there's no proof that the benefits of a more ready immune system (longer potentially permanent immunity?) overshadows the inherent risks of getting infected (chances of long covid, hospitalization, infecting more at risk people in your household)

Just like Delta changed the landscape by increasing the likelihood of children getting infected, so has omicron in how quick it has mutated and how transmissible it has become.

 

I’m so glad I grew up in Houston when I did.

 

Angry, Defiant Stacey Abrams Is The ‘New Normal’

https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/0...angry-defiant-stacey-abrams-is-the-new-normal

excerpt:

Mind you, of everyone in the photo at the school, Abrams, as a plus-sized Woman of Color, was the only one who would appear to be at high risk of severe Covid-related illness.
​

more at the link

 

Democratic leaders in NJ, Delaware, Connecticut, Oregon and Pennsylvania are lifting mask mandates for children.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/nyregion/nj-school-mask-mandate-murphy.html
N.J. Governor to End School Mask Mandate in Move to ‘Normalcy’
For the first time since the start of the pandemic, New Jersey districts will be permitted to allow students and teachers to stop wearing masks.

Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey, a Democrat who has imposed some of the nation’s most stringent pandemic-related mandates, will no longer require students and school employees to wear masks, signaling a deliberate shift toward treating the coronavirus as a part of daily life.

“This is not a declaration of victory as much as an acknowledgment that we can responsibly live with this thing,” Mr. Murphy, the vice chairman of the National Governors Association, said Monday in announcing the elimination of the mandate.

The new policy will take effect the second week of March, two years after New York and New Jersey became early epicenters of a virus that has since mutated and resurged, killing more than 900,000 people nationwide.

The debate over mask wearing in schools has proved one of the most divisive issues in the pandemic, embroiling parents, school boards, teachers and elected officials in caustic clashes over academic loss, protecting public health and individual choice.

Mr. Murphy’s move follows a decision last month by the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, to rescind his state’s school mask mandate.

After Mr. Murphy’s plans became public on Monday, Democratic leaders in Connecticut, Delaware and Oregon also announced that they would end their states’ in-school mask mandates. Connecticut will permit students and staff members to stop wearing masks by no later than Feb. 28; Delaware and Oregon will end their mandates by March 31.

An average of 78 New Jersey residents died each day from Covid-19 in the last week, contributing to a daily nationwide death toll of 2,600, a per capita rate that far exceeds those of other wealthy nations.

But new cases of the highly contagious Omicron variant are plummeting in New Jersey and across the country.

Last week, after meeting with President Biden at the White House during an annual governors conference, Mr. Murphy suggested it was time to reconsider how to manage the virus. “The overwhelming sentiment on both sides of the aisle,” he said on Wednesday, “is we want to get to a place where we can live with this thing in as normal a fashion as possible.”

School districts — already at the center of polarizing mask battles that have shut down board meetings, provoked protests and led to round after round of legal challenges — will be free to continue to require mask wearing or to restore the rules if the virus spikes again. Districts are sure to face pressure, whether they choose to follow the governor’s lead and get rid of mask rules or keep them in place.

Republican leaders in many states, including Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida, have banned mask mandates in schools, leading to court fights with districts that wanted to enforce mask wearing.

The controversy over masks helped energize Republican voters in last year’s governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia. And conservative candidates who are targeting Democratic opponents ahead of November’s pivotal midterm elections continue to tap frustration among parents weary of school disruptions.

New Jersey is among 11 states, including many of the country’s most populous, Democrat-led regions, that have made mask wearing mandatory for all students. This means that roughly 65 percent of the country’s 500 largest school districts have either full or partial mask requirements, according to the technology company Burbio, which tracks how schools have fared during the pandemic.

Students in New Jersey have been required to wear masks since September 2020, when most schools reopened after a four-month lockdown. In September 2021, Mr. Murphy expanded the mandate to apply to children 2 and older in day care and preschool — a rule that will also be lifted March 7.
Masks protect both the wearer from infection and those nearby from being infected. People who reported always wearing a mask indoors in public were less likely to test positive for the virus, according to a report released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Two studies published in September by the C.D.C. — which continues to recommend that children 2 and older wear masks at school and in day care — also found evidence that masks help prevent in-school transmission.

But prominent doctors, in a flurry of recent opinion essays and news appearances, have begun to question the validity of requiring students to wear masks as virus cases rapidly decline across the country. Doctors supportive of removing masks cite the extraordinary mental health strain children have faced during the pandemic and the educational value of seeing full faces, particularly for students who are nonnative English speakers or are learning to read.

“We need to get them back to normal,” said Dr. Lucy McBride, an internist in Washington, D.C., who has joined other doctors in calling for an end to school mask mandates.
cont.

 

cont.
“I think the dam is breaking,” she added.

“It’s hard to speak out because there’s been this sort of protect-against-Covid-at-all-costs attitude, which made sense in 2020, when we had no vaccines,” she said. “It just doesn’t add up anymore.”

But Dr. Jeanne Craft, president of the New Jersey chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said she was still treating children who become seriously ill from Covid. While vaccines are widely available, she noted that pediatric inoculation rates, particularly for children age 5 to 11, are low. Children exposed in school can also transmit the virus to vulnerable relatives at home, including siblings younger than 5, who are not yet able to be vaccinated.

“Saying that children are less likely to die of Covid, less likely to get severely sick from Covid, doesn’t mean that they can’t and that they don’t,” Dr. Craft said.

She stressed the importance of being willing to quickly adjust policies as virus rates change within communities.

“We are all cautiously optimistic in New Jersey that this most recent surge seems to have peaked,” she said. “But we were happy after the first and second surges ended, too.”

Mask rules in schools around the world vary widely, with some countries requiring pupils to wear them despite very low infection rates and others mandating masks only for older students, or only during surges in the pandemic.

Mr. Murphy has required all school employees to be vaccinated or submit to weekly testing; he has not required them to get a booster shot.

The state’s largest teachers’ union, the New Jersey Education Association, a close ally of Mr. Murphy’s, said it agreed that the data showed the mask mandate can be “safely relaxed.” If virus cases spike, Mr. Murphy should keep open the possibility of “reimposing the mask mandate,” union leaders said in a statement.

Mr. Murphy’s decision comes less than two months after the Omicron variant began cutting a fresh path of destruction across the country. Last month’s spike in new infections caused widespread staffing shortages at hospitals, airlines and schools, forcing many districts to temporarily shift to all-virtual instruction.

But health experts who advised Mr. Biden as he prepared to take office have publicly urged him to adopt a strategy geared to the “new normal” of living with the virus indefinitely, not to wiping it out.

New Jersey’s policy shift is based on the state’s precipitous drop in new cases and the declining severity of the disease, as well as a request Pfizer and its partner, BioNTech, made last week to the Food and Drug Administration to authorize a vaccine for children younger than 5, aides to Mr. Murphy said.

Mr. Murphy, in an interview on Sunday, also said that the implementation was deliberately timed for March, when temperatures will begin to climb, giving schools additional ventilation options. Many schools have kept windows open all winter to improve air flow.

The governor has frequently noted that requiring students and staff members to wear masks all day was never intended to be a permanent solution.

Removing them, Mr. Murphy said, is a “huge step toward normalcy.”

In Connecticut, Gov. Ned Lamont said the end to masking in schools and day care centers had been made possible by a decline in virus cases and the state’s high vaccination rate.

“I think this is something we’ve earned, Connecticut,” Mr. Lamont said Monday afternoon.

In New York State, where a school mask mandate is set to expire on Feb. 21, Gov. Kathy Hochul said she was meeting Tuesday with superintendents and analyzing key data, noting that just weeks ago hospitals were understaffed and overwhelmed.

“I am optimistic that we’re trending in that direction,” she said Monday when asked about lifting the state’s school mask mandate, “but I still need the time.”

Dr. Bernard F. Bragen Jr., the superintendent of schools in Edison, N.J., one of the state’s largest suburban districts, said he expected to drop the mask requirement, while creating an environment that makes students who choose to wear masks comfortable.

Mask wearing, he said, had met with little to no resistance from students or parents in Edison.

“Some parents will welcome this option,” Dr. Bragen said. “But for other parents — their students may be wearing masks for years.”

Even before Monday’s announcement by Mr. Murphy, many school districts had begun to signal a desire to get closer to prepandemic footing.

In Cranford, N.J., where a parent who joined a legal challenge to overturn the mask mandate refused to wear a mask at a recent school board meeting, forcing it to adjourn, the superintendent sent a letter Friday stating his “renewed sense of optimism.”

Valentine’s Day parties would go on as planned, he wrote. Class trips for middle school students had been approved. And spectators were again welcome at indoor athletic events.

“We will continue to safely, and incrementally, move towards normalcy,” the superintendent, Dr. Scott Rubin, wrote.

But without a mask mandate, policies related to Covid exposure are likely to get far more complicated, administrators said.

Mask wearing has allowed schools to limit the number of students considered close contacts of an infected child or teacher, as defined by the C.D.C., minimizing the need to keep asymptomatic, unvaccinated individuals out of class. Unless guidance that determines who needs to isolate is altered, students exposed to the virus could be required to stay home more frequently once masks come off.

“If our goal is to keep students in school, then continuing to wear masks does that,” said Wendy Donat, a history teacher at Summit High School and a member of the executive board of her local teachers’ union.

“I don’t want to go back to teaching online,” she added, “and they sure don’t want to go back to learning online.”

 

I'm just going to point out that the PRC didn't need a pandemic to institute the social credit system. It was there before the pandemic was a thing. Also this idea that the pandemic is somehow helping the CCP isn't supported by what is happening in the PRC. The legitimacy of the CCP is built upon their ability to improve the economy and lift living standards. The pandemic has made all of that more difficult and has been feeding into simmering problems with the PRC as it reaches the limits of its ability grow.

There have been protests and complaints on PRC social media over the harsh lockdowns they have made. There has also been complaints about the PRC and the ineffectiveness of their vaccines among countries that the PRC is trying to win over. The pandemic hasn't made things better for the CCP but made things worse.

Also while Australia and NZ enacted some of the harshest policies even with those I don't think there is much danger of them becoming authoritarian states. Based on opinion surveys following the situation with Djokovic it appears that most Aussies support their government's policies.

 

Hochul better get her act together on this one too

 

That Study of Face Masks Does Not Show What the CDC Claims
The agency further undermines its credibility by desperately trying to back up conclusions it has already reached.

https://reason.com/2022/02/07/that-study-of-face-masks-does-not-show-what-the-cdc-claims/

 

The hysterical lady b****ing out Youngkin in a grocery store over masks makes me sad. "Read the room, buddy!" pretty much sums it up. Wear a mask because of social stigma and bullying, not because it's the correct thing to do. If you're going to try to shame someone into wearing a mask, at least do it under the pretense of its own efficacy and not peer pressure.

 

GOT EM. ZAKHEM. OS SUCKS.

 

Red and yellow
Geto boys
Slime in the ice machine
Astroworld , the real one

 

They have the depth of understanding of how governments work, and the costs therein...of a 12 year old, by and large they are all about themselves, over the good of everyone...

Selfish.

This thread is proof, you are inconvenienced..without a thought for the masks protecting the most vulnerable amongst us....just whining.....because it bugs you...wah wah wah.

My wife is a teacher, they get exposed because of kids not wearing masks or parents hiding it all the damned time.....disgraceful the selfishness of people.

DD

 

We need to heal the world
For the children