Good morning and welcome back to the Morning Jolt! Isaac Schorr filling in again for Jim Geraghty today. On the menu: The asininity of Eric Adams’s Covid regime and the demise of the Capitol Hill fox.
Another Covid-Theater Encore
In case you hadn’t noticed, largely cosmetic Covid-era restrictions are creeping back into the picture.
Take New York City mayor Eric Adams’s decision to continue to force children under the age of five to wear masks while in school or at daycare. Adams had previously promised that the younger cohort would be able to join older students in breathing free and seeing each other laugh and smile beginning this past Monday, but he reneged on that promise in a press conference held last Friday, citing rising caseloads.
“New Yorkers, we want you to be prepared, not panicked,” said Adams. His health commissioner, Dr. Ashwin Vasan, asked for “patience and grace.”
At this point, to show people like Adams and Vasan any more “patience and grace” feels like an act of unholy collaboration with the enemies of children’s well-established interests.
Rising caseloads alone cannot possibly be enough to justify the continued enforcement of a mandate only on the group that is least at risk of long-term adverse health outcomes as a result of contracting the disease — especially when the dubiously effective cure has its own set of consequences.
That masks impair communication should be obvious enough to all by now — try speaking with a flight attendant while complying with the federal mandate in the sky — but worse yet, they also impair the development of communication skills in children. The psychological damage in this case is only compounded by the fact that young children are the only ones being muzzled, giving them the impression that they are at special risk of either dying from the disease or passing it on to their loved ones.
It’s a corrosive and false impression. On March 30, Vasan himself shared a chart showing that children up to four years old had the lowest case rate of any age group in the city. And in fact, while recorded cases have seen a slight uptick over the past week, they remain far lower than they were at the start of the year:
Even for those children who do get sick, the risk of being hospitalized is extremely low (between .1 and 1.5 percent of childhood cases result in hospitalization) and of death, lower to the point of being statistically negligible (0.00-0.02 percent of childhood cases are fatal) according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Moreover, while Vasan claims that the mandate’s purpose is to “ensure that our youngest New Yorkers remain safe,” we’ve been told for two years now that we wear masks mostly for the benefit of protecting others, not ourselves.
Perhaps the most infuriating aspect of Adams’s decision is just how little thought he appears to have put into it.
During a town-hall event with CNN’s Dana Bash on Tuesday, the mayor was asked, “Why are we the only city in the world to be masking toddlers?” despite the fact that New York City boasts not a single pediatric Covid hospitalization at the moment. Here’s how he replied:
Because we are the only state, the only city on the globe like New York City. There is no other city like New York City. If we gauge our reactions, behaviors based on other cities, we will make a big mistake. People duplicate New York City because of the density, the population, the diversity. We have a unique way of dealing with crises, responding to crises and recovering from crises. This is not Eric’s thought on how to address this, this is based on my medical team.
But nobody is duplicating New York City on this front; why should they when Adams doesn’t even try to present evidence supporting his decision? In fact, across the world, it was rare for governments to force toddlers to don masks at any point during the pandemic, much less at this late stage, after the development of effective vaccines and therapeutics. That the mayor is not only failing to exercise his judgement, but failing to think at all about what’s best for his city’s children is no small indictment.
And while Adams’s decision is especially enraging, he’s not the only one regressing on this front. Both Georgetown and Johns Hopkins University have reinstated their indoor mask mandate. The Biden administration’s Transportation Security Administration refuses to relent on the aforementioned mandate for air travelers. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that its namesake is poised to bring back its mandate.
Every time you think you’re out, they pull you back in.
The only hope for salvation comes in the form of November’s elections, when voters will at last have the opportunity to show the busybody know-nothings the door. If progressives won’t be convince by empirical evidence, the last resort left is political, and nothing short of an electoral massacre will be sufficient.
Fox (Formerly) on the Run
Capitol Police hunted down and apprehended a suspect (and mother) on Tuesday. They then turned the suspect over to the Washington, D.C., Department of Health, which promptly executed the subject by lethal injection, sans a trial.
Her offspring remain in custody. Officials would not confirm or deny whether they, too, would face summary execution for the sins of their mother.
The deceased suspect, a red fox, was accused of biting a total of nine victims during her Jack the Ripper-like reign of terror. Execution was deemed the only proper remedy because she needed to be tested for rabies, and brain tissue must be sent to the lab for such a test to be carried out. In this way, some might argue, she was not unique, but rather just one more example of an individual sacrificed upon the altar of public health.
Post-execution, one of the alleged victims, Representative Ami Bera (D., Calif.), expressed doubt that the deceased fox had been the one who attacked him:
At first, I recoiled at the state’s solution. After all, unlike Harambe, the fox presented no imminent danger to any individual, or to the public at-large upon its capture.
But upon further examination, while this was a tough call, it was also the only one to be made. The rabies test came back positive, and for those who may not be aware, rabies, untreated, has a mortality rate of somewhere around 100 percent.
Once a rabies infection is established, there’s no effective treatment. Though a small number of people have survived rabies, the disease usually causes death. For that reason, if you think you’ve been exposed to rabies, you must get a series of shots to prevent the infection from taking hold
In other words, those bitten by Mother Fox needed to know as soon as possible whether they had been exposed to rabies. It was a matter of life and death.
ADDENDUM: This happened a few days ago now, and I cannot for the life of me find the clip of it online, so I thought it worth mentioning: CBS honored a retiring, behind-the-scenes member of its broadcast team on Monday, enlisting Jim Nantz to speak to his accomplishments. When the camera found its way to the honoree’s face, the older man was overcome with emotion, burying his face in his hands. He clearly never expected that kind of recognition. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
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