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Returning to normalcy

Are we returning to normalcy?

The word “normalcy,” as history buffs know, was used (but not invented) by our only journalist president, Warren G. Harding, to sum up his 1920 campaign. Normalcy was political shorthand for returning to normal times after a European war, prosecutions of peaceful protesters, sharp inflation and depression, terrorist bombings at home, totalitarian revolutions abroad and a pandemic influenza that killed, proportionately, more than twice as many Americans as COVID-19.

Normalcy was popular, too. Harding won the popular vote 60% to 34%, the largest percentage margin in history. The fighting ended; the economy grew; political protesters were pardoned; revolutionaries slumbered. Harding ushered in a decade of widespread prosperity, technological progress and Republican victories. The appeal of normalcy transcended even the most rigid of party lines.

Normalcy’s appeal is apparent now on the issue of masks in schools. Last week, the Washington Post ran an opinion article by three Massachusetts academic physicians arguing that masks in schools are no longer needed because the few adults at risk can protect themselves.

Masks at school are “an intervention that provides little discernible benefit,” chimed in an Atlantic article by three blue-state professionals. Mandatory masking “should end when coronavirus rates return to pre-Omicron levels,” wrote Brooklyn-based New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg.

All seven of these writers are women with school-age children. They know from personal experience, as well as statistical evidence, that masking harms young children. Like almost everyone, they have known for nearly two years that children are at very low risk of serious harm from COVID. Recent evidence indicates that unvaccinated grade schoolers are at lower risk than vaccinated adults and at lower risk from COVID than from influenza.

Mandatory masking of schoolchildren, as California special education teacher Alex Gutentag argues in the Tablet, is a policy “with catastrophic second-order effects but little epidemiological value” imposed by “a coordinated attempt by public health officials and reporters to limit open discussion and skew coverage of COVID.”

Blame goes to elected officials who have ratified the recommendations of purported experts while ignoring or underestimating the human costs of the recommended restrictions. Even more blame, in my view, goes to teachers union members and leaders, who have been screaming that any relaxation of mask mandates, any return to normalcy, amounts to mass murder.

Teachers might be excused because they’ve suffered through flu viruses circulating widely in schools every winter. And credentialed public health officials are perhaps institutionally inclined to over-recommend caution; for a man with only a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But something that looks more like corruption may be involved.

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