COVID conflict: Democratic governors skip ahead of Biden and CDC on easing mask mandates
LA TimesKathy Hochul listens as President Biden speaks during a meeting with the National Governors Assn. “Governors are picking up on a sense that voters simply won’t tolerate mask mandates any longer,” said Julia Lynch, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. The administration continues to recommend indoor masking in areas of high transmission, which, according to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, “is basically the entire country at this point.” Psaki said the president would keep to his campaign promise — defer to the nation’s top scientists in how the federal government responds to the pandemic. In a wide-ranging NBC News interview Thursday, Biden responded to whether states and cities were moving too quickly to loosen indoor mask mandates, telling anchor Lester Holt: “I’ve committed that I would follow the science — the science as put forward by the CDC, and the federal people. Dr. Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University, said because the public can get widely available vaccines and high-quality masks, they’re in a better position to individually “decide the level of risk that they’re willing to take instead of this being a government mandate.” Wen said that governors’ announcements to ease mask mandates ahead of any new CDC guidance is a result of slow decision-making at the federal level.