I read the attempt to discredit the NY Times reporting on Hamas's systemic sexual violence so you don't have to. You should, so you can see the full extent of the depravity & misogyny enabled & required by antisemitism. But here are the highlights.
I have a confession.
At the start of the 21-22 school year, I supported vaccine mandates for teachers. I thought it was the best way to get to normalcy for our children.
I was wrong, & I sincerely apologize.
I hope that all that I've done since then helps ameliorate the harm.
In NYC, unvaccinated students can't go to school dances, including prom. Vaxd & unvaxd kids all sit together every day in school, why can't they be together at prom? It's punitive at this point and needs to end. Kids have lost 2 years, they deserve every experience they can get.
I am sitting in a local coffeeshop and who walks in but a (well-known) NYC politician who is constantly tweeting about how NYC needs an indoor mask mandate. Obviously he walked in without a mask, ordered without a mask, and is now enjoying his breakfast without a mask.
I'm just a mom of a toddler, trying to get through the end of the year, begging you to please stop reporting your kid's positive covid test to the school.
If you are a rich white woman, the easiest thing you can do to be accepted in the cool social justice circles is to listen to NPR, read prestige media, "listen to and learn from Black women," internalize those opinions, & start espousing them. I know because I was this woman. 1/
On the students arrested at Columbia: “A Post deep-dive into the backgrounds of the protesters shows many list multimillion-dollar mansions as their home addresses, according to arrest records, and come from wealthy and powerful families.”
Here is my four year old, bravely carrying the entire weight of the pandemic on her tiny shoulders. I hope this picture makes people feel safer as they go about their maskless lives.
@NYCMayor
,
#unmaskmytoddler
#unmaskourtoddlers
A woman in a Mom FB group I'm in asked for suggestions for a care package for a 13 yo who tested positive for covid and is now quarantined alone in the basement for 10 days (including Christmas).
None of the comments except for 2 (1 of which was mine) questioned this.
I don't know which Dem strategist decided that mocking parents desperate for non-existent baby formula was good politics, but that person should probably be fired.
This is abuse. If in 2019 someone told you they were making their 13 year old live in the basement for 10 days over Christmas break because the 13 year old had a cold & they didn't want the rest of the family to catch it, you would seriously consider calling the authorities.
I spent about half an hour today chatting with a high level employee at NYCDOHMH and I'm still kind of processing it, but my main takeaway was that if we let these people continue to call the shots we are going to be dealing with restrictions for a very very very long time. 🧵
Our
@NYCCouncil
members enjoy a fun meal together. Meanwhile, our public school kids eat silent lunch while sitting distanced on the cafeteria floor or outside on the frigid ground. And then have masked outdoor recess.
Thank you all for your support. It's been a circus for the past few hours but I am hearing and seeing all of your supportive texts & DMs. The fight continues.
Parents today rallied to remind everyone that
@NYCMayor
continues to mask toddlers and only toddlers. NYC is a statewide, national & international outlier.
@NYCMayor
has offered us no metrics, no science, no explanation, & no end date.
#unmaskNYCtoddlers
It is April 11, 2022.
It is the 6th week of masking toddlers & only toddlers
Our mayor has COVID because he attended a superspreader dinner of the political elite
Kyrie can play, but the concession workers at Barclays were fired for being unvaccinated
Public Health is a joke.
It is 8am and already 80 degrees today in NYC. High expected to be 94. Regardless,
@NYCMayor
@NYCHealthCommr
demands toddlers in daycare and preschool to wear their masks for 6+ hrs today as they learn to speak, read, and socialize. May the odds be ever in your favor.
Once school mask mandates end, parents are going to be pretty surprised when their kind, compassionate, caring kids who don't even mind masks and want to protect their communities rip off their masks within the first 5 minutes of sitting in class.
Guys we have Democrats (!!!!) saying school shouldn't close and blue checks saying we're all going to get Omicron and Dr. Leanna freaking Wen calling cloth masks "facial decorations" and I need to sit down before I fall over from my head spinning so much.
I don't care whether masking harms kids. No adult had to prove they were "harmed" before they were allowed to go about their lives without masks. It is grotesque to continue to recommend kids mask because there isn't provable "harm."
@rweingarten
@nanalatinaAA
@DOEChancellor
@AppletoZucchini
@Chalkbeat
But you enjoyed not having to wear a mask, right? While students in the city you live in - many of whom are vaccinated - have to wear their masks for 6+ hrs every day, even outdoors, while they're in school. If you claim to be pro-student, as you claim, it's time to take a stand.
Shocking how when we all learned that cloth masks are useless & our kids were fine even with their useless masks, our reaction was not "Thank god & let's get these filthy things off our kids faces" but instead was "More masks! Mask harder everyone!"
For everyone who says "covid restrictions are over," my friend was just denied entry to his child's NYC school building for a family event because he did not have his covid vaccine card with him.
Can we talk about why certain American public health officials are obsessed with masks, especially masks on small children? This phenomenon does not seem to occur in European public health officials. Why?
Remember when we just let hypochondriacs be weird and do their own thing (you want to line the entire toilet seat with paper before sitting? Fine whatever) and then about two years ago we handed them the reins and let them make all the rules?
Someone should tweet about how
@NYCMayor
was at a dinner unmasked with like 14 other COVID+ government officials & yet he's prancing about going to press events and dinners, but a masked NYC 3 year old who was in a classroom with a COVID+ classmate needs to quarantine for 5 days.
But the pediatric vaccine efficacy was so low, I said. I told her that there were 0 hospitalizations in the control arm of the ped vaccine trials. She didn't know that. Wtf. This person works in public health and didn't know the ped vaccine reduced deaths from 0 to 0?
.
@NYCHealthCommr
is now openly saying that as NYC moves into the "yellow zone" in a few weeks, a general indoor mask mandate will be re-imposed.
He can do this because he was given unchecked authority by
@NYCMayor
to impose an anti-science, arbitrary mask mandate on toddlers.
My daughter's teachers keep sending home notes to get me to set up her Google classroom "just in case" there's a snow day and we have to "pivot to remote." I don't know what to tell them. I refuse to engage in the remote school farce anymore. I did enough remote school. I am done
My daughters' Jewish summer camp is requiring covid vaccines for summer 2023.
This anti-science decision is keeping Jewish children out of Jewish experiences, for no discernible reason. Jewish institutions that continue to exclude children should be ashamed.
At this point, if you want to avoid getting covid, you need to take that on yourself. You cannot continue to demand that society comport itself in a way to prevent them from getting covid. We avoided hospital overflow, it's over, the end.
Kids did everything right. They "stayed home to stay safe" (even though they were never at risk); they "masked up" (even the littlest kids, those learning how to speak & read); they got vaccinated. And we are still actively making their lives worse, smaller, because we can.
20% of NYC got covid in the past 3 wks. That's 1.8M people. Are we to think that at least 360k NYers are now walking around permanently disabled? Wouldn't we, like, notice?
How can people say things that are so obviously wrong, and people continue to take them seriously?
If you tell liberal, well educated adults that Florida doesn't require school masks, they reflexively know how to respond - Floriduh and Deathsantis and Republican death cult. If you tell them the EU doesn't recommend masks for kids under 12, their synapses misfire.
I would love to meet the person who thinks that a group of 4 year olds imperfectly wearing masks for 6 hrs a day, except for their 30 min lunch and 45 min rest time, is an effective way to control COVID.
@NYCMayor
, are you that person?
My four year old is allowed to take off her mask in the private outdoor playground of her PreK, but only if her class is the only class there. If there's another class present, masks stay on.
It's called The Science™️ and who are we mere mortals to question it?
It also explains why so many of the protesters are women. Women are a) more likely to be disdained for being white & privileged; & b) more likely to seek social acceptance. Thus, women are more likely to seek to adopt a different persona as a way of gaining acceptance. /end
From today's child vax announcement:
Pfizer: children do not get sick enough for us to test the efficacy of our covid vaccine.
Apoorva in the NY Times: all children, quite simply, face a existential threat from covid, thank god they can be vaccinated.
If your school is not opening normally tomorrow, I suggest you start organizing to fight back right now. "The numbers" aren't getting better anytime soon. Schools will not magically reopen. You have to make them reopen.
Back to these girls. These rich, privileged girls have adopted the social justice cause du jour - hating Israel - as a way to shed their privileged white girl status & be accepted by their social justice cool kid peers. It's really that simple. 5/
And after I typed this out I read this amazing article by
@VPrasadMDMPH
, in which he makes the point I'm making but way more eloquently. It's normal people vs experts and the experts are really screwing this up.
Is there a COVID policy dumber than
@NYCMayor
's Toddler Mask Mandate, which decided that a group of four year olds chewing and licking their masks all day (except for lunch and nap) was not only a good COVID control measure, but in fact the only COVID control measure necessary?
We are now entering the fifth week of
@NYCMayor
@NYCHealthCommr
's Toddler Mask Mandate, in which toddlers & only toddlers have to wear masks at daycare & preschool.
Please thank these brave pandemic warriors, carrying the burden no one else is required to.
#unmaskourtoddlers
This is all performative to them. This is about rich white girls wanting to feel like they have the right opinions and will be accepted by the right people. Last year it was BLM and Defund. This year it's Free Palestine. Next year who knows. 6/
People in PH still think they are doing god's work, protecting people who are too dumb to make their own decisions, & if we had all just acted a little better the pandemic would be over. And they think that everyone agrees with them. It is completely divorced from reality.
But that wasn't even the most shocking part. This person was telling me, over and over again, that it was so interesting talking to me because she hadn't met a single other person with my views. She admitted she was in an echo chamber. This is a huge problem.
I saw today a group of toddlers on the way to the park with their daycare teachers, all masked. It was about 85 degrees outside at 10am. Why. Why do we keep doing this.
I imagine it's very unsettling to have been on Team Panic for the past 22 months & now you're seeing everyone move over to Team Fuck It.
That is exactly as charitable as I am able to be to those whose fear & anxiety contributed to de facto locked my kids out of school for a year
It is time to make my kids dinner. AGAIN.
Did you know kids have to eat dinner every single night? Every single night! Without fail.
This is what they should teach you in sex education.
Can someone tell me how the toddlers in Westchester & Long Island are doing? They haven't been wearing masks to their daycares & preschools for over 5 weeks.
Have they suffered irreparable harm, as NYC attorneys alleged NYC toddlers would if they were allowed to unmask?
Like school reopening, school mask mandates are a political decision, not a health decision. There is no health metric that will end school mask mandates (or any mask mandates) - they will end when it is no longer politically feasible to keep them.
"Now It Can Be Said," Toddler Mask edition.
Approximately a year too late,
@DanaGoldstein
@nytimes
realizes that it's silly to mask toddlers, especially when you mask only toddlers (and only low-income ones).
"As New York tries to return to some semblance of normal life ... the last COVID-19 containment policy is masking toddlers? It seems like the plot of a dystopian novel, not the policy of a progressive, vibrant, cosmopolitan city."
Thank you
@VPrasadMDMPH
!
"In highly vaccinated New England, the hospitalization rate right now for kids under 17 is about 7 per 10 million. That is not a typo."
7 out of 10 MILLION and we are still making kids wear masks at recess (nevermind indoors).
.
@NYCMayor
lied parents.
He told us to "Trust me, they'll be unmasked."
He told us that the masks would be coming off April 4.
On April 1, he fought a court battle to keep his Toddler Mask Mandate. And then bragged about winning.
Shameful & dishonorable.
I stopped being like this around August 2020 because I saw how harmful the liberal groupthink on covid was, especially to children. But until that point, adopting progressive talking points was harmless and carried social credit - I would be accepted by the "cool girls." 3/
Reminder that it is not inherently progressive to allow those with office jobs to hibernate in their homes while low wage service workers cater to them or to lock children out of school so that their moms drop out of the workforce to care for and educate them.
Stop reporting your positive covid cases to your school.
I said this in June 2022 & I was dragged for it, but if you keep telling your school about your kid getting covid, shit like this will keep happening.
Your kid got a cold. Keep them home for a few days & keep it moving.
A DC area elementary school — Montgomery County, Maryland — is reinstating a mask mandate — N95’s — for third graders over a few kids testing positive for covid. Here’s the letter. They’re coming with masks for your kids again. Get ready. Read this insanity.
I do not think I have felt as patronized as I feel when
@NYCMayor
tells me that my 4 yo has to mask *despite my objections to it as her mother*, because "we have to save our babies."
My baby. I'm her mother. I do not co-parent with you.
#toddlermaskmandate
#unmaskourtoddlers
In retrospect it is unsurprising that after basically everyone got covid and it was fine, the zero-covid crowd would pivot to "you're going to get it several times a year and each time be worse than the last."
So let me get this straight, the last group in the entirety of the United States to be able to unmask will be...NYC toddlers.
This is your legacy,
@NYCMayor
&
@NYCHealthCommr
.
How "equitable."
@conz
I had a friend who told me that prior to having kids she would get her new mom friends a ridiculously expensive baby outfit at Barney's, and it was only post-kids that she realized what an annoying gift this was.
A Short List of Dumb NYC Covid Rules
1. Toddler mask mandate
2. Unvaxd kids can't go to prom
3. Mask mandate on the subway, in buses & cabs (open the window!!) & in transit hubs (Laguardia, Penn)
4. Private sector vax mandate, except if you're rich & famous
What am I missing?
Caught up with a friend today. She's moving to England (where she's from) in two weeks. She told me it's normal there - kids don't wear masks and if you talk about the long term effects of covid, people look at you like you have three eyeballs. I'm super jealous.
I can't attend my daughter's in-class birthday party in November 2022.
Everyone knows that parents attending their child's in-class birthday party is the primary way that covid spreads, so it makes total sense that this is the one remaining restriction.
I recently got my eyes checked at a LensCrafters. One side of the store is an eyeglass shop, where you don't have to mask. The other side of the store is where your eyes are checked, which is healthcare & therefore masks required. The difference in flooring is the dividing line.
Here is a definitive list of Democrat elected officials in NYC who are standing up for toddlers & saying publicly how wrong it is that toddlers and only toddlers remain masked in this city:
1.
Step right up, you can be the first!
Has anyone else noticed the quiet shift from "kids don't even mind masks" to "there is no rigorous scientific evidence showing the long-term impacts to masking kids so it's fine it's totally fine"?
After yrs of being dismissed for being a mom - a wine mom, a yoga mom, a privileged white mom, an anti-mask mom - I am very sensitive to those who mock women for being "just" a mom. Being a SAHM mom is hard, and I respect every single woman who chooses to stay home full-time.
Of course, once you stop just blindly parroting the progressive talking points, you are quickly kicked out of the cool kids club. As I learned in August 2020, and as many progressive Jews learned in October 2023. But I digress. 4/
In NYC, kids go to school & sit next to each other (& let's be honest, the high schoolers are not just calmly sitting). But once the bell rings, the unvaxd go home while the vaxd can do afterschool sports & clubs.
It's called The Science™️ & we're not allowed to question it.
@queens_parents
@deb_kross
It is the craziest mandate. You can sit next to the same students all day long but you can't be next to them once that final bell rings. These are the mandates that are causing the distrust and actually working against them.
By far, my least favorite people during the pandemic have been the healthy under-50 year olds who sanctimoniously explained to me that they were ordering groceries online to "stay home and stay safe."
Yesterday my toddler threw up at school. I was there to pick her up and saw it happen. Because we have TheNYCScience™️, she was wearing a mask. Yes you read that correctly she THREW UP IN HER MASK.
I have a picture but it is actually too disgusting to share. You're welcome.
I don't want a Republican to win but also I believe that the people who shut down schools and forced kids to mask far longer than warranted (especially the toddlers who masked 3 months longer than anyone else) should face consequence for their actions. It's tough.
I am frankly stunned that
@NYCHealthCommr
@NYCMayor
is keeping the toddler mask mandate. Cases are rising so we are keeping masks on toddlers and only toddlers?
NYC parents, join me in refusing the mask your toddler on Monday. The law is on our side.
"Pre-k pupils aged 3-5 will have to mask up all year, according to a letter to parents Friday from the School District of Philadelphia."
These are children who have never gone to school without a mask. They've never known normalcy.
Absurd & monstrous.
In my former "progressive" Lawyer Moms group, these same types of people threatened, multiple times in 20/21, to come after my job & my husband's job for my racist & white supremacist advocacy of...wanting schools to reopen.
Now that their jobs are threatened, they're running.
The point of collective action "slow the spread" was to avoid hospitals from being overrun.
It was never about you, personally, not getting sick.
A month ago we had record high covid cases in NYC without attendant hospital overflow.
We did it. The emergency is over.