Jeremy Duda from the Arizona Mirror tweets:
GOP gubernatorial hopeful @MattSalmonAZ is calling for a special session to provide ESAs (vouchers) for students whose school districts impose mask mandates. A statewide ban on such mandates goes into effect on Sept 29, but some districts are enacting them in the meantime.
— Jeremy Duda (@jeremyduda) August 6, 2021
Where did Matt Salmon get such a damn fool idea? Apparently this is the latest thing among the MAGA/QAnon death cult.
The Miami Herald reports, Florida approves vouchers for ‘COVID-19 harassment,’ new pandemic protocols in schools:
Florida parents will be allowed to apply for vouchers and move their kids to another school if they perceive any type of “COVID-19 harassment” against their child in connection to district rules on masking, testing and isolation due to exposure, under a new emergency rule approved Friday.
The rule, approved unanimously by the State Board of Education, was hastily crafted by state education and health officials in response to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ executive order last week that called for rules that would protect parents’ decisions on whether their children should wear masks in K-12 schools.
These anti-masker snowflakes can pay tuition out of their own damn pocket. Taxpayers should no longer have to coddle these public health threats to society any longer.
DeSantis issued the order after several Florida school districts, including Broward County, announced plans to reinstate mask mandates amid a rapid rise in cases, including among children, many of whom are still not eligible for vaccines.
But the emergency rule and new protocols issued Friday by the Florida Department of Health concede that districts may, in fact, impose mask mandates if they allow parents to opt out of them. DeSantis had threatened to withhold state funding from districts that do not comply with the order.
The state’s actions are part of the governor’s larger push to prevent COVID-19 mandates such as mask requirements for children in schools. DeSantis has been more forceful on the matter in the last couple of weeks, after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended everyone, regardless of vaccination status, wear masks indoors at K-12 schools this fall.
“Giving parents options to make these decisions is not controversial. I’m proud that today we took action to make sure school administrators respect parents’ rights to make educational and healthcare decisions for their families,” DeSantis said in a statement after the rules his administration crafted were approved. “I will continue to fight to protect Florida’s families from government overreach and to preserve their God-given rights.”
What is it with you wingnuts? You characterize literally everything as a “God-given right.” Bullshit. The Constitution and man-made laws give you rights. God has nothing to do with it. See DeSantis’ executive order for example.
Giving parents the right to allow their child to become a super-spreader of the Delta variant of Covid-19 among innocent children who are not members of your cult is no one’s right. If you MAGA/QAnon death cult nuts want to die, I suggest that you get on with it, and be quick about it. But you have no right to put others at risk with your damn fool cult beliefs.
The issue sits at the intersection of both the governor’s policy and his political agenda, as his political team amplifies his stance on the issue and fundraises off of it. President Joe Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, on Friday criticized DeSantis’ decisions.
“Not only is Governor DeSantis not abiding by public health decisions, he’s fundraising off of this. So my view is that, and our view as an administration, is that teachers, parents in Florida, parents across the country, should have the ability and the knowledge that their kids are going to school in their safe environments. That shouldn’t be too much to ask,” Psaki said.
Florida Department of Health officials unveiled new protocols that detail how the spread of the virus should be controlled in school settings.
The new protocols say students have the option to wear masks as a preventative measure but give parents and legal guardians the option to opt-out a student from following a school’s mask or face covering requirement.
The protocols include a “non-discrimination” clause that says students whose parents opted them out of a mask requirement shall not be excluded from any school-sponsored activities or isolated for not following the mandate. There is also a provision that says fully vaccinated students and asymptomatic kids who have tested positive for COVID-19 within the past three months can still attend school and activities.
This is totally ineffective and self-defeating, putting everyone at risk by coddling these anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. Where were these narcissists and their Ayn Randian rational egoism (aka rational selfishness) during the polio epidemic back in the day, before universal polio vaccinations have nearly eradicated polio from the world today?
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.” – John Rogers.
Parents and legal guardians also must provide written consent before a school can test a minor for COVID-19.
The State Board of Education is also expanding the type of choice parents have for the upcoming school year by bringing school vouchers into the equation.
School vouchers are the Republican answer to every question, just like tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. It is the only tune they know.
Snowflake parents can now claim “COVID-19 harassment” over a district’s COVID-19 rules and apply for a Hope scholarship to transfer kids to another school of their choice. Specifically, a parent can apply for a voucher in “instances where a child has been subjected to COVID-19 harassment will provide parents another means to protect the health and education of their child by moving their child to another school.”
The state has defined “COVID-19 harassment” broadly: “any threatening, discriminatory, insulting, or dehumanizing verbal, written or physical conduct an individual student suffers in relation to, or as a result of, school districts protocols for COVID-19, including masking requirement, the separation or isolation of students, or COVID-19 testing requirements.” [Masking, quarantine, testing and tracing – the basic tools of fighting any infectious disease.]
Furthermore, the rule says “unnecessarily isolating, quarantining, or subjecting children to physical COVID-19 constraints in schools poses a threat to developmental upbringing and should not occur absent a heightened showing of an actual illness or serious risk of illness to other students.”
You mean like this, which the Board ignored for politics? Delta variant fuels concerns for children’s health in Florida:
Greater numbers of American children are being swept up in a wave of coronavirus infections driven by the Delta variant, causing renewed anxiety for parents and a bitter political fight as schools prepare to reopen within weeks.
Much of the surge is concentrated in the southeastern state of Florida, where some school districts are defying an order by the Republican governor forbidding mask mandates, in the latest political twist in the health crisis.
“Parents are put into an impossible situation of having to choose between the health and life of their child and returning (to) school,” said a lawsuit against the governor’s order filed by parents of children with disabilities on Friday.
[The] Delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox and largely drove 72,000 pediatric cases in the week leading up to July 29, according to a new study by the American Academy of Pediatrics, a figure five times higher than in late June.
Nearly 20,000 of those cases were in Florida, according to state data.
Florida is also experiencing the highest number of hospitalizations for minors in the country, currently 143, which is ahead of Texas.
“We definitely have seen an increase in cases here, in our emergency department and also within the rest of the hospital, in the last two or three weeks,” Dr. Marcos Mestre, medical director of Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami, told AFP News Agency.
PARENTS VOICE CONCERNS
When the voucher rule was being considered during an hour-long conference call Friday, dozens of parents voiced opposition and support for it, exemplifying the polarization around the issue of mask wearing and other COVID-19 protocols in schools.
One parent, for instance, said that public health measures should not be considered “harassment” – Florida requires certain vaccines to be administered before children may enroll and attend childcare and school – while another parent said that no child should be “segregated” or discriminated against based on their health decisions.
Where did this snowflake parent get this idea? QAnon Queen Marjorie Taylor Greene Compares COVID Vaccine Requirements to ‘Segregation’:
Having gotten into hot water for comparing COVID-19 public-health measures like mask and vaccine mandates to the Holocaust, and the Democrats supporting them to Nazis, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has chosen a different but still powerfully offensive analogy. On Twitter she suggested that vaccine requirements by private businesses amount to segregation:
This is called segregation.
Will you be testing everyone at the door for the flu, strep throat, stomach bugs, colds, meningitis, aids, venereal diseases, Hep A, Hep C, staff infections, athletes foot, pink eye, croup, bronchitis, ringworm, scabies, or any other contagions? pic.twitter.com/osUBTYqGCg
— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) July 26, 2021
It’s more objectionable, of course, that a member of Congress representing a former Confederate state where mandatory racial segregation replaced slavery and was imposed on public and private facilities for roughly three-quarters of a century would think of that monstrous regime as an appropriate analogy for restaurants and entertainment venues protecting their patrons from the consequences of a personal decision against COVID-19 vaccination. Last time I checked, the victims of Jim Crow did not choose to be members of an oppressed racial minority, nor did the system’s perpetrators have a rationale for segregation other than bigotry.
The Miami Herald continues:
[S]ome hospitals in Florida are reporting an uptick in pediatric COVID patients. That reality may be attributed to the disease’s severity, or it could be a function of the sheer number of pediatric cases the state is reporting every week.
At any rate, the numbers show kids are certainly capable of contracting and spreading the delta variant. More than 10,000 children under 12 came down with COVID last week, according to the state.
Many Democratic state lawmakers and critics of the rule have raised questions about the rule’s legal standing. In particular, they question how the State Board of Education has the power to broaden the state law that governs the Hope scholarship program.
When the Legislature created the Hope scholarship program in 2018, the intent was to provide vouchers to kids who are being bullied or harassed. Democratic state lawmakers have argued the new COVID rule violated the intent of the law and that the executive branch does not have the authority to broaden the program’s statute.
‘THE BOARD HAS THE ABSOLUTE AUTHORITY’
State Board of Education Vice Chair Ben Gibson argued the board does have that authority because it is expanding the definition of harassment under the law.
“The rule is narrowly tailored, and it aligns with the statute creating the Hope scholarship, and the board has the absolute authority to define harassment further, which we’ve done,” Gibson said.
Mark Richard, an employment and education lawyer who represents teachers unions, including the Florida Education Association, said the rule is a “power grab.”
“This is … taking away the rights from local school boards to issue masking mandates to protect our kids. This safety crisis created by the Governor will assuredly end up in court as parents stand up to protect their families,” Richard said in an email Friday. (see below).
Several parents during the conference call questioned whether parents would be able to claim “COVID-19 harassment” and use a voucher to move their kid to “safe schools that require masks.”
The answer was yes.
“This could be on either side of whatever the mandate is. If a child for whatever reason is harassed by other students or anyone at the school in connection to their health protocols,” said Matthew Mears, the general counsel for the Florida Department of Education.
Mears added: “This rule allows a parent to access a scholarship that they could use to go to a different public school, they could cross to a different district … or you could access a private school that accepts paid scholarships.”
[T]eacher union representatives have also voiced their disdain for the voucher rule, saying it is another attempt by the state to try and steer public money away from public schools.
“I am extremely upset and disappointed that the Florida Board of Education has voted to offer parents who protest mask mandates the choice to opt out or receive a voucher to send their children to a private or charter school that does not require masks,” Broward Teachers Union President Anna Fusco said in a statement. “Coupled with the state’s refusal to release $11 billion in federal COVID recovery funding to our public schools, this is a thinly veiled attempt to further erode and dismantle Florida’s public education system.”
Florida is one of seven states that has not yet submitted its plan to the U.S. Department of Education on how it plans to spend roughly $7 billion in federal COVID-19 relief funds earmarked for education and the safe reopening of schools.
DESANTIS’ EXECUTIVE ORDER CHALLENGED
On Friday, a group of Florida parents of children with disabilities sued DeSantis, Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran, the state Department of Education and eight school districts in federal court over DeSantis’ July executive order. They argued the state and the governor are violating their children’s rights under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.
“By refusing to allow school districts to implement mask mandates, Governor DeSantis has placed an illegal barrier for students with disabilities which is preventing our state’s most vulnerable students from returning to public schools,” the lawsuit alleges.
The parents argue in the lawsuit that the lack of adequate online schooling options combined with the lack of effective mask mandates make for an impossible choice for parents: Should children return to in-person schooling they fear is unsafe? Or should they leave the public school system?
The parents are seeking an injunction to stop the executive order from affecting their children. They’re also asking to be awarded attorneys’ fees, costs, expenses and unspecified damages.
No more coddling MAGA/QAnon cultists and anti-masker, anti-vaxxer snowflakes. Put on your damn mask and get vaccinated already.
* * *
DeSantis’ executive order banning mask mandates in schools drew its authority from a bill the governor signed into law June 29: the “Parents’ Bill of Rights.” That law says the state is not allowed to “infringe on the fundamental rights of a parent” to direct the…health care” of a child “without demonstrating that such action is reasonable and necessary to achieve a compelling state interest.”
Which parents? Whose rights? Do disabled students not have rights? (Yes, they do).
The Parents’ Bill of Rights legislation passed largely along party lines during this year’s lawmaking session. However, masking in schools was not a part of the discussion as the proposal made its way through the Legislature. In House and the Senate floor debates, lawmakers instead wrangled over other components of the bill. For example, House lawmakers, debated a section allowing parents to opt their child out of sex education classes.
While making the case for his executive order, DeSantis has contended that district mask mandates put into place during the 2020-2021 school year had essentially no effect on the safety of children.
That was the original Covid -19 virus and the Alpha variant. The Delta variant is a whole different animal. Moron.
The highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus complicates the governor’s case for banning mask mandates, experts say. Even if infected children are not at high risk for the disease’s worst effects, they can still spread coronavirus to teachers far easier than during past surges.
“Last year it looked like kids alone could not sustain transmission. Now, it looks like kids alone can sustain transmission.” said Thomas Hladish, a research scientist at the University of Florida’s department of biology and the Emerging Pathogens Institute.
If kids are able to spread the disease to teachers easier, it could create staffing issues in public schools, Hladish noted.
It’s unclear how the state will handle potential teacher shortages.
No more coddling these MAGA/QAnon cultists and their anti-science, anti-masker, anti-vaxxer nonsense. Put your damn mask on and get the vaccine! You represent a public health threat. You should be treated like Typhoid Mary – forcibly quarantined on an isolated island for the rest of her life.
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Charles Blow writes at the New York Times, “Anti-Vax Insanity”, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/08/opinion/anti-vaccine-america.html
Nothing better exemplifies the gaping political divide in this country than our embarrassing and asinine vaccine response. Donald Trump’s scorched earth political strategy has fooled millions of Americans into flirting with death. [A cult.] And now thousands are once again dying for it.
Almost from the beginning, efforts to combat the virus were met with disdain from a president who felt the crisis made him look bad. The science was denied. We came to live in a world where masking was mocked and ingesting disinfectant was offered up as a possible cure.
All the while, the patients on ventilators gasped for breath, and refrigerated trailers filled with bodies. Death is one of the ultimate truths of life, and yet not even it could dissuade the headstrong from casting doubt on the science.
And then, a miracle.
In response to this raging, deadly virus, scientists developed multiple, highly effective vaccines with breathtaking speed. It was like a prayer had been answered. An antidote to the plague had arrived.
We should all have been celebrating in the streets and running to a lifesaving serum with our sleeves rolled up and a smile on our face. But not enough of us were.
The public had been poisoned by partisanship. Masking was a political statement. Social distancing was a political statement. Receiving the vaccine, for far too many, was a political statement.
And so, countless Americans responded with a political statement of their own: defiance.
They hated that businesses were forced to close, and being asked to wear masks inside when they reopened. They hated their children having to stay home from school and being made to wear masks when they returned.
But, the simple truth is that all of this could have been avoided if all Americans eligible for the vaccine — and that’s pretty much every adult at this point — had simply chosen to be vaccinated. But they didn’t. They haven’t. They are too dug in, too committed to the lies and conspiracies, too devoted to rebellion.
In the beginning, as the vaccine was rolled out, there were some access hurdles and some understandable apprehensions. But now, billions of people worldwide have received the vaccine, and very few have had adverse effects.
The vaccine is safe, incredibly safe.
There are no microchips or magnets in it. It does not cause Covid and it is not more dangerous than Covid.
Believing all these lies is a luxury of people who have not sat by a hospital bedside, or watched from behind glass, because Covid regulations prevented them from comforting a relative or friend as they drew their last breath, struggling against a virus that choked that breath off.
It is a luxury to be irresponsible in a society where others will be responsible for you, where you simply assume that you are safer because others take the appropriate precautions to be safe: You do not need to get the shot because others have.
But the Delta variant is testing that faith.
You will not be safe as an unvaccinated person riding on the coattails of the vaccinated. Delta is extremely transmissible and unremitting. It is stronger than its progenitor.
As the Delta variant surges there is an uptick in the pace of vaccinations in the country. It’s almost like religion: Many disbelievers will call out to whatever God there may be when the reaper is at the door. Fear of ideological defeat is no match for the fear of imminent death. And yet, it shouldn’t have taken another surge of sickness and death for good sense to set in.
Why were Americans turning away a vaccine that many people in other parts of the world were literally dying for? Many did so because of their fidelity to the lie and their fidelity to the liar. They did it because they were — and still are — slavishly devoted to Trump, and because many politicians and conservative commentators helped Trump propagate his lies.
A recent Monmouth University poll found that “among those who admit they will not get the vaccine if they can avoid it, 70 percent either identify with or lean toward the Republican Party while just 6 percent align with the Democrats.”
The optics of countless socially distanced funerals is less offensive to those conservatives than the optics of being socially distanced in a Fuddruckers.
It was all lunacy. It is all lunacy. This should never have happened. There are people dead today — a lot of them! — who should still be alive and who would be if people in the heights of government and the heights of the media had not fed them lies about the virus.
But apparently, after you get so used to so much blood on your hands, you forget — or make yourself forget — that you weren’t born with red palms.
So, we have a situation in America where people are dying and will continue to die of ignorance and stubbornness. They are determined to prove that they are right even if it puts them on the wrong side of a eulogy.
This is like watching millions of people playing in traffic.
The New York Times reports, “‘This Is Really Scary’: Kids Struggle With Long Covid”, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/08/health/long-covid-kids.html
(excerpt)
As young people across the country prepare to return to school, many are struggling to recover from lingering post-Covid neurological, physical or psychiatric symptoms. Often called “long Covid,” the symptoms and their duration vary, as does the severity.
Studies estimate long Covid may affect between 10 percent and 30 percent of adults infected with the coronavirus. Estimates from the handful of studies of children so far range widely. At an April congressional hearing, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, cited one study suggesting that between 11 percent and 15 percent of infected youths might “end up with this long-term consequence, which can be pretty devastating in terms of things like school performance.”
The challenges facing young patients come as pediatric Covid-19 cases rise sharply, driven by the highly contagious Delta variant and the fact that well under half of 12-to-17-year-olds are fully vaccinated and children under 12 are still ineligible for vaccines.
Doctors say even youths with mild or asymptomatic initial infections may experience long Covid: confounding, sometimes debilitating issues that disrupt their schooling, sleep, extracurricular activities and other aspects of life.
“The potential impact is huge,” said Dr. Avindra Nath, chief of infections of the nervous system at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. “I mean, they’re in their formative years. Once you start falling behind, it’s very hard because the kids lose their own self-confidence too. It’s a downward spiral.”
[N]early 4.2 million young people in the United States have had Covid-19, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Relatively small percentages have been hospitalized for initial infections or developed a condition called Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) that can emerge several weeks later. Doctors expect considerably more will experience long Covid.
At Boston Children’s Hospital, where a program draws long Covid patients from across the country, “we’re seeing things like fatigue, headaches, brain fog, memory and concentration difficulties, sleep disturbances, ongoing change in smell and taste,” said Dr. Molly Wilson-Murphy, a neuroinfectious diseases specialist there. She said most patients were “kids who had Covid and weren’t hospitalized, recovered at home, and then they have symptoms that just never go away — or they seem to get totally better and then a couple of weeks or a month or so after, they develop symptoms.”
Dr. Amanda Morrow, co-director of the pediatric post-Covid-19 clinic at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, said getting treatment early might help recovery. Post-Covid clinics find they need multiple specialists and approaches including exercise, cognitive behavioral therapy, sleep modification and medication for issues such as respiratory and gastrointestinal problems.
“We don’t yet have any sort of good predictors of who will be affected, how much they’ll be affected and how quickly they’ll recover,” Dr. Wilson-Murphy said, adding “We don’t have any sort of magic treatment.”
The Washington Post reports, “Public health experts urge local mask and vaccine requirements as schools reopen across the country”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/08/mask-vaccine-requirements-recommendations-schools/
Public health experts are urging more businesses and local officials to enact mask and vaccine requirements to slow the spread of the coronavirus as the more contagious delta variant drives a fourth surge of covid-19 cases in the United States.
“The time has come,” Anthony S. Fauci, the White House’s chief coronavirus medical adviser, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday. “We’ve got to go the extra step to get people vaccinated. You want to persuade them, that’s good … but for those who do not want, I believe mandates at the local level need to be done.”
Fauci also said he hoped the Food and Drug Administration would grant full approval of the coronavirus vaccines — now under emergency use authorizations — within the next month, though he emphasized that FDA officials were operating independently.
Once that happens, Fauci said he thinks businesses, colleges and universities, and other local entities would feel “empowerment” to enact more of their own mandates.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said on “Meet the Press” that she supported a vaccine mandate for teachers, in part to help protect children who could not yet be inoculated. She also noted that immunizations — and immunization requirements — have been in schools since the 19th century.
“Vaccines are the single-most important way of dealing with covid,” Weingarten said. “As a matter of personal conscience, I think that we need to be working with our employers, not opposing them, on vaccine mandates.”
Weingarten estimated that about 90 percent of the teachers who are members of the union have gotten the vaccine.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month changed its guidance to recommend all children older than 2 wear a mask when they return to school, regardless of vaccination status.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said on “Face the Nation” that he has spoken with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and to the Florida education commissioner to try to persuade them to take more measures to protect students while keeping schools open.
“We’re clearly at a fork in the road in this country,” Cardona said. “You’re either going to help students be in school in-person and be safe, or the decisions you make will hurt students. While I understand the argument around not wanting to wear masks because we’re fatigued, without question student safety and staff safety come first.”
Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb encouraged schools to provide students with higher-quality masks, like the K-N95, and to test regularly, especially for those students who cannot yet receive the vaccine.
“I can’t think of a business right now that would put 30 unvaccinated people in a confined space without masks and keep them there for the whole day,” Gottlieb said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “No business would do that responsibly, and yet that’s what we’re going to be doing in some schools.”
Meanwhile, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, sounded exasperated when asked whether he thought it was time for more vaccine mandates, acknowledging that they had become polarizing.
“How did we get here? Why is it that a mandate about vaccines or wearing a mask suddenly becomes a statement about your political party?” Collins said. “We never should have let that happen. Come on, America. We can separate these. We’re incredibly polarized about politics. We don’t really need to be polarized about a virus that’s killing people.”
Collins also said he hoped the FDA might grant full approval of the coronavirus vaccines “within the next month,” but urged those still unvaccinated to get the shots as soon as possible, as they have been safe and effective for millions.
“Please, if you’re on the fence, get off the fence,” Collins said. “Find a place that’s easy. Go to Vaccines.gov. Roll up your sleeve. Become part of the winning team.”