The mantra of COVID-19’s dangerous enablers and their justification for opposing face mask mandates and vaccination requirements is “personal choice,” no matter what. Yet the loudest of them also threw in with 11 other states now asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the historic Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 that guarantees personal choice in the matter of abortion.
That would be Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who appears oblivious to his own hypocrisy. His denunciation of “forced masking” follows a classic demagogic pattern: Tell people what they want to hear regardless of consequences.
Preventable illness and death are the potential consequences of DeSantis’ latest executive order, effectively forbidding schools from requiring face masks even though there are still no approved COVID-19 vaccines for children under 12. The order appeared aimed squarely at Broward County.
His order coincided with the startling news that Florida led the nation with 110,477 new COVID-19 cases last week, some 37,000 more than the week before. Broward and Miami-Dade hospitals last week admitted the most COVID-19 patients of any counties in the U.S.
DeSantis says masking children is a decision for parents — not the government. That’s an abdication of the state’s responsibility to keep all children as safe as possible in the schools that the state compels them to attend until they are 16.
“Personal choice” does not do away with personal responsibility, and there’s no such thing as absolute personal choice.
For example, it’s a personal choice to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. But driving drunk can cost you a great deal of money and put you in prison. Smoking is banned in workplaces, because your fumes can inflict cancer and heart disease on nonsmokers.
Choosing to expose yourself to a deadly pandemic by refusing to be vaccinated, wear a mask or practice social distancing where necessary is a personal choice with public consequences. It scoffs at personal responsibility. People who don’t vaccinate against COVID-19 risk not just their own lives, but the lives of others whom they could infect before they know they are infected.
Masks are the next line of defense. That’s especially true for children not yet eligible for the vaccines and indeed for everyone else. Even vaccinated people harbor and spread the delta variant.
Although DeSantis advises the unvaccinated to get jabbed, he muddled his message by signing a law, likely unconstitutional, that forbids governments, schools and businesses from requiring proof of vaccination. He hasn’t gone so far as to bar local mask requirements, but he effectively nullified them by ruling out fines or other enforcement tools.
In his executive order against school mask mandates, DeSantis cited a Brown University study of COVID-19 data for Florida schools that he said “found no correlation with mask mandates.” He presumably meant no correlation between mask mandates and COVID school cases.
That’s true, but misleading, and it was somewhat beside the point. The data were based on the last school year’s statistics, before the onset of the delta variant.
The study separately analyzed data from Florida, where school policies varied, and New York and Massachusetts, where masking was mandatory statewide. Paradoxically, the study found higher COVID-19 rates in places with lower student in-person density levels. That suggested strongly that factors outside the schools influenced infection rates.
The authors, led by Emily Oster, a Brown professor of economics, warned against confusing correlation with cause. In other words, against jumping to conclusions like DeSantis seems to have done. The report was made available to the Sun Sentinel in pre-print and has not been peer reviewed.
“(W)e focus on mandates and not on actual behavior,” the authors wrote. “Masking is likely correlated with mask mandates, but it is also likely that some individuals mask even in the absence of a mandate and that there is imperfect compliance even with a mandate.”
In short, there were too many variables to conclude that mask mandates were not beneficial to schoolchildren. The data also suggested there were fewer COVID-19 infections in schools with improved ventilation.
Another Brown study, not mentioned by DeSantis, documented political partisanship as the strongest predictor of whether somebody wears a mask or practices social distancing — even among conservatives who considered themselves at high risk.
“It turned out that life is not the most important thing to people,” said co-author Steven Sloman, a Brown professor of psychological sciences. “Many people are putting their partisan leanings ahead of their self-interest. We’re willing to outsource our thinking to other people in our communities — even when our lives are at stake.”
Donald Trump created that fools’ gallery. Now DeSantis courts it as his ticket to the White House.
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August 09, 2021 at 03:00PM
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Editorial: The hypocrisy, and danger, of DeSantis’ ‘personal choice’ talk - Yakima Herald-Republic
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