COVID is Over

Last July, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo, with the support of the New York State Health Department, ended all mask mandates for schoolchildren, leaving that choice to parents and local school districts.

A few weeks later, after Cuomo announced his imminent resignation, then-Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul announced she would reverse that order - with no scientific backing - but simply to placate the state's powerful teachers union. She then imposed a statewide forced child masking mandate, when she took over as the next Governor.

For six months - from September, 2021 to March, 2022 - Hochul's forced child masking has gagged our children, saturated their lungs and blood with CO2, cut-off their vision, stunted their physical, emotional and mental development, and set-back an entire generation of children. An explosion of drug abuse, depression, social isolation, teen suicide, and child psychological distress has been the result.

Were children in danger from COVID, perhaps there might have been some rationale for masking - but the opposite is true. The number of COVID deaths of healthy children over the past two years has been close to zero. Over 25 other dangers - from drowning, to choking on bottle caps, to bicycle accidents, to poisonings from bleach, to the flu, to school bus accidents, are more dangerous to children than COVID.

Increasingly the rationale cited by Hochul and her allies was that children need to be masked to protect adults, who need not be masked.

A civilized society protects its children. Adults are expected to sacrifice to protect the innocence of children. That basic morality underlies every healthy society. By some narcissistic perversion of morality, Hochul inverted the principle that adults must sacrifice to protect children, into its opposite: that children must be sacrificed to satisfy the vanity and selfishness of adults.

This week, with every other Democratic governor - including in New Jersey and Connecticut - having abandoned forced child masking, Hochul examined the "political science" - her political polling - and decided that forced child masking was a political loser. She finally ended the mask mandates, effective March 2nd.

COVID as a pandemic for adults has long been over. It was never a pandemic for children.

Even the likes of the horrible Hochul now recognize that. Let us hope that it never happens again.