National Public Radio: Connecticut Moms Say Democrats’ Deceptive COVID Mandates Driving Them to Republican Party

Susan Berry, PhD

National Public Radio (NPR) reported Monday many suburban Connecticut parents say the Democrats’ deceptive COVID mandates that have only just recently been lifted amount to “too little, too late,” and have driven them to Republican candidates for public office.

While President Joe Biden attempted to tout his administration’s pandemic success during his State of the Union address last week, he left the window open for further mandates, noting, “because this virus mutates and spreads.”

In fact, Biden quietly extended the national COVID emergency indefinitely on February 18, with the White House following up with a National COVID-19 Preparedness Plan.

Suburban moms in Connecticut, however, have become more engaged in politics as a result of many issues that pertain to their children and education, not the least of which is mask mandates – which have been supported by Democrat politicians until just before Biden’s State of the Union address.

Amelia Fogarty, for example, though a Democrat her entire life, recently switched parties and told NPR she plans to vote Republican this November due to this issue, though her decision has strained her relationships with some Democrat friends and family members.

“It’s been really sad and very isolating, but I have stuck to my guns because I just, I feel very strongly in my heart that I know that this is not right,” she said.

A self-described independent, Caroline Montero said she had always been a moderate and only voted occasionally. Now, however, she is laser-focused on politics.

“I’m absolutely going to be more involved in voting in midterms and any other election,” she told NPR. “It opened my eyes to how important it is to have the right people in the right seat or the people you want in the right seat.”

NPR reported the two mothers “are part of the ‘mask choice’ movement that would leave it up to parents to decide if their kids should wear a mask.”

That view, however, “went against the Centers for Disease Control for most of the past two years,” the report noted. “Just last week, the CDC rolled back longstanding guidelines calling for universal masking in schools for children age 2 and older.”

Mothers, such as Fogarty and Montero, felt their pleas to their local Democrat elected officials fell on deaf ears, even though they presented sound data on the low-risk COVID presents to children.

“Only the Republicans met with me,” Montero said.

“I just feel like they are not listening to their constituents in any way and I’m really frustrated and I’m just done with the party, to be honest,” Fogarty asserted.

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds (R) captured that sentiment exactly in her response to Biden’s State of the Union address when she said, “Republicans believe that parents matter. It was true before the pandemic and has never been more important to say out loud: Parents matter.”

And in Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) also defeated former Governor Terry McAuliffe (D) primarily as a result of his resolve to defend parents’ rights.

Yet, the data showing the ineffectiveness and harmfulness of mask-wearing in children has been available to all the policy-makers who chose to attend to it.

In December, epidemiologist Dr. Paul Alexander compiled at Brownstone Institute “more than 150 comparative studies and articles on mask ineffectiveness and harms.”

Alexander prefaced the evidence with this statement, citing the Great Barrington Declaration, authored in October 2020 by Drs. Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya, and which now has over 928,000 signatures:

Because we saw very early on that the lockdowns were the single greatest mistake in public health history. We knew the history and knew they would not work. We also knew very early of COVID’s risk stratification. Sadly, our children will bear the catastrophic consequences and not just educationally, of the deeply flawed school closure policy for decades to come (particularly our minority children who were least able to afford this). Many are still pressured to wear masks and punished for not doing so.

“To date, the evidence has been stable and clear that masks do not work to control the virus and they can be harmful and especially to children,” Alexander asserted.

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo last week railed against masks and the doctors who continue to insist they are “saving lives.”

Industrial research scientist Stephen Petty, an expert in the use of masks, has repeatedly said the cloth masks that have been commonly used by people during the pandemic are useless in stopping the spread of the virus that causes COVID disease. Petty is featured below in an episode of his “Petty Podcast,” in which he states some public health officials are finally admitting the cloth masks fail to block the spread of the airborne virus.

Last week, Biden CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky further struggled to defend her agency’s failed handling of the pandemic during a visit to the Washington University School of Medicine.

Though Walensky and other federal health officials insisted every decision they made involved “following the science,” the CDC director, while discussing the COVID vaccines, admitted they were operating on “hope” instead:

So many of us wanted to be hopeful. So many of us wanted to say, ‘OK, this is our ticket out, right? Now we’re done.’ So, I think we had perhaps too little caution and too much optimism for some good things that came our way. I really do. I think all of us wanted this to be done. Nobody said ‘waning.’ … You know, ‘Oh, this vaccine’s going to work.’ [Nobody said,] ‘Oh, maybe it’ll wear off.’ Nobody said … ‘What if it’s not as potent against the next variant?’”

After over a year of White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, Walensky, and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials insisting to Americans they are “following the science” in their decision-making, Walensky blamed the American people for misinterpreting that statement to mean they actually had “science” to back up their decisions. Now, she says, “science is grey.”

I have frequently said “we’re going to lead with the science,” “science is going to be the foundation of everything we do” – that is entirely true. I think the public heard that as science is foolproof, science is black and white, science is immediate and then we get the answer and we make the decision based on the answer. The truth is science is grey. And science is not always immediate. And sometimes it takes months and years to find out the answer. But you have to make decisions in the pandemic before you have that answer.

A study released in late February found the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine against the Omicron variant “declined rapidly” in children aged 5 to 11 years.

Nevertheless, in early November, while voting to approve the Pfizer vaccine for these young children, Eric Rubin, M.D., a member of the FDA independent advisory panel and editor-in-chief of New England Journal of Medicine, made the statement, “We’re never gonna learn about how safe the vaccine is until we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes.”

And Walensky’s CDC went along with it:

Walensky had already admitted in February 2021 the decision to continue the school mask mandates for children, most of whom are at extremely low risk for serious disease from COVID-19, was based on “an in-depth review of the available science and evidence,” and having “engaged with many education and public-health partners.”

Walensky said the concerns of these “partners,” i.e., teachers’ unions, “were so informative, and direct changes to the guidance were made as a result of them.”

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Susan Berry, PhD, is national education editor at The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected].

 

 

 

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