Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has issued an executive order banning masks in schools. He slammed the CDC’s recommendation in favour of them, saying it showed the organisation had a “callous disregard for the physical, emotional, and academic well-being of our children.”
DeSantis issued the order on Friday, which noted that forcing children to wear masks in schools “may lead to negative health and societal ramifications,” and could also “inhibit breathing, lead to the collection of dangerous impurities and adversely affect communications in the classroom and student performance.” It also argued that there was no stastically siginificant evidence that would show that mask mandates affected the rate of coronavirus spread.
At a press conference only hours before the institution of his order, the Governor said that banning masks in schools was the right move. “I think that this decision about whether parents want their kids to have to wear masks all day at school, I think that’s a decision that falls squarely within the concord of this Parents’ Bill of Rights that I signed,” he said.
DeSantis also slammed the CDC and other authorities for their ridiculous recommendations. “There is no off-ramp,” he said. “We were told that the off-ramp was vaccinations. Now we’re told that that’s not going to be the case, and yet you’re going to have to do masking, you may have to do restrictions and potentially other severe forms of mitigation which we know have a devastating impact on so many people’s lives and livelihoods and freedoms,” he continued.
The Florida Governor said that the CDC had instituted policies “so ham-handedly,” which showed “the callous disregard for the physical, emotional, and academic well-being of our children,” saying that they need to be put first. “We had this whole year and a half where so many people in our society wanted to put the kids last,” DeSantis argued. “They wanted to impose most of the most extreme mitigation on the kids that were the least likely to face any negative harm from this.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis says that the CDC recommending masks in schools "shows a callous disregard for the physical, emotional, and academic well-being of our children." pic.twitter.com/3wcgmPzuJe
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 30, 2021
However, Democrat-run institutions will likely pose a strong opposition against the ban on masks in schools. The Broward County School Board on Wednesday imposed a mask mandate for children in the coming school year, but this would be superseded by the executive order, along with similar instructions issued by Gadsden County.
Broward School Board chairwoman Rosalind Osgood also said that anti-maskers trying to attend a school board meeting on the county’s child mask mandate equates to an “almost insurrection.” Osgood used the Democrats’ “insurrection” buzzword to marginalize citizens who peacefully protested and tried to enter a meeting Tuesday to make their voices heard, prompting the school board to cancel the meeting.
