Another governor is ending school mask mandates across the state having arbitrarily decided that the pandemic is "over", only this time it's a Democratic governor in New Jersey's Phil Murphy.
Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey, a Democrat who has imposed some of the nation’s most stringent pandemic-related mandates, will no longer require students and school employees to wear masks, signaling a deliberate shift toward treating the coronavirus as a part of daily life.
Mr. Murphy, the vice chairman of the National Governors Association, said on Sunday that he would officially announce the elimination of the mandate on Monday afternoon. The new policy will take effect the second week of March, two years after New York and New Jersey became early epicenters of a virus that has since mutated and resurged, killing more than 900,000 people nationwide.
The debate over mask wearing in schools has proved one of the most divisive issues in the pandemic, embroiling parents, school boards, teachers and elected officials in caustic clashes over academic loss, protecting public health and individual choice.
Mr. Murphy’s move follows a decision last month by the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, to rescind his state’s school mask mandate. The Democratic governors of New York and Connecticut also said last week that they were re-evaluating school mask mandates that are soon set to expire.
An average of 78 New Jersey residents died each day from Covid-19 in the last week, contributing to a daily nationwide death toll of 2,600, a per capita rate that far exceeds those of other wealthy nations.
But new cases of the highly contagious Omicron variant are plummeting in New Jersey and across the country.
Last week, after meeting with President Biden at the White House during an annual governors conference, Mr. Murphy suggested it was time to reconsider how to manage the virus. “The overwhelming sentiment on both sides of the aisle,” he said on Wednesday, “is we want to get to a place where we can live with this thing in as normal a fashion as possible.”
Deaths are still above 2,500 per day from the virus and we're above 900,000 total deaths and counting, with tens of millions suffering from Long COVID symptoms of fatigue, memory loss, chronic pain, heart and lung problems and more, but both Republicans and Democrats have decided that this is the new normal.
Most of all the behavior of White House staffers on the pandemic hasn't changed at all from the Trump era.
President Joe Biden’s top science adviser, Eric Lander, bullied and demeaned his subordinates and violated the White House’s workplace policy, an internal White House investigation recently concluded, according to interviews and an audio recording obtained by POLITICO.
The two-month investigation found “credible evidence” that Lander — a Cabinet member and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy who the White House touts as a key player in the pandemic response — was “bullying” toward his then-general counsel, Rachel Wallace, according to a recorded January briefing on the investigation’s findings.
Christian Peele, the White House’s deputy director of management and administration for personnel, said that the investigation also concluded that there was “credible evidence of disrespectful interactions with staff by Dr. Lander and OSTP leadership,” according to the roughly 20-minute briefing, which included a representative of the White House Counsel’s office.
There was also “credible evidence” that Lander had spoken “harshly and disrespectfully to colleagues in front of other colleagues,” Peele said, according to the recording. “The investigation found credible evidence of instances of multiple women having complained to other staff about negative interactions with Dr. Lander, where he spoke to them in a demeaning or abrasive way in front of other staff,” Peele said in the recording.
In an office of roughly 140 people, 14 current and former OSTP staffers who worked under Lander this past year shared similar descriptions of a toxic work environment where they say Lander frequently bullied, cut off and dismissed subordinates. Nine of those current and former OSTP staffers said Lander yelled and sometimes made people feel humiliated in front of their peers. Most were granted anonymity because they feared retaliation from Lander.
The behavior is at odds with Biden's Day-1 warning to his political appointees that anyone who disrespected their colleagues would be fired “On the spot. No ifs, ands or buts.”
This is the sort of idiotic nonsense that we used to hear about Trtump's pandemic response team. To see the exact sort of foolishness play out under Biden is just damning.
Live with the lethal virus, folks.
That's the Democratic platform in 2022.
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