New Jersey governor Phil Murphy is, according to the New York Times, set to announce today the end of the mask mandate in Garden State schools. But the mandate doesn’t end right away; Murphy is going to wait until mid March, or two years after pandemic shutdowns began. This strikes me as analogous to waiting for the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 to declare the Armistice, while soldiers continued, pointlessly, to die. If masks are ineffective, why wait another five weeks to stop requiring them? Did the Masked Groundhog see his shadow or something?
Moreover, according to the Times, Murphy’s plan is to allow individual school districts to continue to mandate masks. It’s not hard to picture many, most, or all New Jersey public-school students being forced to wear masks indefinitely, with the sole difference being that Murphy will distance himself slightly from this insane cult of mass child abuse.
Murphy shouldn’t wait to end the mask mandate; he should have ended it a long time ago, after evidence came in (c.f. the Bangladesh mask study) that cloth masks don’t do much of anything and are certainly not worth the burden, especially on children. (N95 masks and the like aren’t fitted for children and don’t work if they’re worn improperly, as children are bound to wear them; this has also been known for the entire school year.) But he also must do what Ron DeSantis did at the outset of the Florida school year, and forbid schools to implement mask mandates.
After that, of course, Murphy needs to make a public statement of contrition and apology and acknowledge that there was never any good reason to believe forced masking was worth the cost. Ideally he should vigorously whip himself with a cat o’ nine tails while doing so. Other Democratic officials around the country, such as New York’s mask-’em-forever governor Kathy Hochul, should do the same.