Yet another politician has set himself up as an expert on public health and an opponent of parental rights.
School Board member Darryl Willie has asked the school superintendent for an emergency meeting of the board to enact a mandatory face mask rule.
That would conflict with the order from Gov. Ron DeSantis requiring local boards to offer students an option to opt out.
Willie is a Democrat. DeSantis is a Republican. School boards in six liberal areas that did not vote for DeSantis already are defying the governor’s order protecting parent’s rights.
“If you look at the data 10 days in, the numbers are much higher than last year,” Willie told First Coast News.
But the data Willis is ignoring is another study finding that masks are not effective in protecting people from the Red Chinese virus.
Studies continue to show that aerosols exhaled by infected individuals can indeed infect others with the virus, even if someone is standing more than six feet away.
A study done at the University of Waterloo found that cloth masks filter just 10 percent of exhaled aerosols. More expensive N95 masks, used by medical personnel, can filter more than 50 percent.
Proper ventilation does as much good as the best masks, the study found.
Dr. Roger W. Koops, in a recent American Institute of Economic Research publication, said there is no clear scientific evidence that masks (surgical or cloth) work to mitigate risk to the wearer or to those coming into contact with the wearer.
The leading journal Nature estimated the survival rate for children and teens to be approximately 99.995 percent.
The only data Willie made reference to in his hysterical call for an emergency meeting was the claim that there are more cases reported in the local schools recently.
That is hardly evidence that masks would lower the number.
There is science and there is political science. Know the difference.
