MESSAGE
| DATE | 2022-06-12 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Take off your masks
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https://nypost.com/2022/06/11/end-all-new-york-mask-mandate-madness-forever/
End all New York mask mandate madness, forever
By Post Editorial Board
June 11, 2022 7:34pm Updated
NYC subway sign showing how to wear COVID masks
Any sane person would recognize it's time to rid New York of mask mandates.
EPA
MORE ON:
MASK MANDATES
Cynical politics, not science, drove the cruel toddler mask mandate
Hochul indicates mass transit mask mandates not lifting anytime soon
Mayor Adams lifting mask mandate for kids under 5 as school year ends
CDC raises monkeypox alert to level 2, recommends masks during travel
Is New York’s COVID mandate madness finally cooling down?
Tuesday, New York state and the MTA axed their requirements for agency
employees to get tested weekly if they’re unvaxxed.
More crucially, Mayor Eric Adams on Thursday announced the end — finally
— of the insane, cruel and utterly anti-science mask mandate for the
city’s youngest kids.
All with good reason: The data on “public health” efforts like this are
unambiguous. Mandates on masks or anything else have no significant
effect — good or bad — on COVID outcomes at the city or state scale.
They only add onerous requirements to people’s everyday life and work,
empower Karens in the public and private sectors and jack up costs for
taxpayers (the MTA’s employee-testing program cost a cool $100 million).
Some are even more harmful, like the toddler mask mandate. It caused
behavioral and learning problems left and right.
The axing of these idiotic rules may be a sign that New York’s electeds
and other officials are starting to reckon more seriously with a reality
already recognized by any sane person.
On the other hand, Gov. Kathy Hochul refuses to end the public-transit
mask mandate, leaving LIRR and MetroNorth commuters to envy their
NJTransit peers. On the subways, meanwhile, we’re seeing a steady growth
in civil disobedience, which means her stubbornness is undermining the
rule of law.
We’ll grant that Hochul and (especially) Adams haven’t been as
ridiculous as many in their party would like. They began unwinding
restrictions at the end of last year, though Hochul seems to wait for
months of clear data before admitting reality, and Adams pays far too
much heed to city health czar and COVID-theater aficionado Ashwin Vasan,
at whose feet can be safely be laid the absurd advice for everyone to
still mask up indoors.
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Crucially, they avoided returns to restrictionism (despite
clickbait-for-COVID-hysterics stories in the likes of The New York
Times). Schools stayed open statewide over the objections of the
teachers unions; there was no resurgence of the absurd vaccine passport
system that helped keep the city and state mired in COVID panic for far
too long.
As Adams rightly put it, if every new wave makes New York “move into
shutdown thoughts [and] panicking, we’re not going to function as a city.”
That’s all the more true since wide-scale testing has been revealed to
be worse than useless: Recent survey data suggests that the city’s
testing regime alone missed 1.3 million cases in just the first quarter
of this year. Then again, case counts haven’t said much about the actual
threat for a long time now, even though too many public-health
authorities (and the Times) keep treating rising counts as omens of doom.
What public health officials need to be concerned with — and always
should’ve been — are deaths and hospitalizations. Both have stayed low
for weeks (for months in the city) and are now indisputably (even
according to Vasan) trending down.
Why? Because the pandemic is over. Immunity (from vaccines and prior
infection) is near-universal. The virus is mutating to become less
deadly over time, as routinely happens with pandemic diseases. (It’s
what evolution favors since killing the host is bad for the bug, too.)
So the state move on compulsory testing is long overdue. As is getting
rid of the NYC private sector vax mandate (which already has a huge hole
in it for celebrities).
What do you think? Post a comment.
We still need to hear the mayor and governor shout from the rooftops
that we’re never, ever going back to restrictionism. New York can’t
fully heal until it’s clear COVID theater is over for good.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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