"The science has changed," squealed CNN’s "medical analyst" Leana Wen Monday evening, desperately trying to justify a spate of sudden decisions to end pandemic measures in blue states.
Only four months ago, Wen proclaimed that the country was "nowhere near" a safe point to remove one of the least popular mandates — the requirement that children, long known to be by far the least vulnerable segment of the population, wear masks at school.
Wen’s verbal gyrations on the unpopular far-left cable news network — which just ditched its CEO ostensibly for failing an internal moral purity test — came days after an unrefuted
Johns Hopkins University analysis of several medical studies concluded that the lockdown measures imposed over much of the country from March 2020 have been "ill-founded," offered "little to no public health effects," and "should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument."
The mainstream media, which has urged keeping Americans under near-house arrest for almost two years, largely ignored these results, as well as Johns Hopkins’s further conclusion that the lockdowns "imposed enormous economic and social costs," which have been all too obvious.
But unlike the unelected and unaccountable administrative-managerial caste upon whose unflinching loyalty they depend, Democratic politicians have started paying attention to the electoral fallout that their increasingly despised and discredited party faces in the looming midterm elections.
Even leftist analysts have already concluded that it will receive a "shellacking" in November of this year. Virtually all polls show that a majority of voters favor flipping Congress to Republican control.
Since January 2021, registered voters by party affiliation have shifted from a seven-point Democratic lead to a five-point Republican advantage.
RealClearPolitics, which produces averages of polls across the media spectrum, now registers Joe Biden’s approval rating at 39.8% — its lowest level to date.
Hypothetical presidential polls show Donald Trump leading or equaling Biden in the popular vote and winning five swing states where he challenged the election results in 2020, heralding a decisive electoral college victory in the likely event that he runs in 2024.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., perhaps the nation’s most popular governor and a near-certain future presidential candidate who banned mask mandates by executive order, is widely credited with the best state-level pandemic leadership in the country.
With a putrid stench of hypocrisy, numerous pro-mandate Democratic politicians — including Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., Georgia’s perennial gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., and former President Barack Obama — have in recent days been photographed unmasked, sometimes in selfies posted on their own social media accounts.
Across the pond, embattled British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has tried to avert the probable collapse of his government — members of which were revealed to have violated pandemic restrictions to have staff cocktail parties — by dropping all of his country’s COVID-19 restrictions with timing that might be described as uncannily prudent.
Meanwhile, Canada’s capital city has been shut down for two weeks by an entirely peaceful demonstration of truck drivers who want to end that country’s pandemic restrictions and rid themselves of their cowardly leftist prime minister Justin Trudeau, who has spent most of the protest in hiding with dismal approval ratings that are even lower than Biden’s.
Some of the Canadian protesters are carrying Trump flags, inviting hapless Ottawa mandarins who can no longer control them to decry their protest as an "insurrection."
Talk of similar demonstrations throughout the United States, which are scheduled to begin this weekend, has lit up social media and alarmed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which cautions that they could "severely disrupt transportation, federal government, and law enforcement operations."
In these circumstances, it may be no surprise that public health has ceased to be such a pressing concern in blue states, even though the Center for Disease Control and the now less-than-trusted Dr. Anthony Fauci still recommend upholding mandates that have proved ineffective.
By the end of the day on Feb. 9, governors in 10 of those states — New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Illinois, California, Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island — announced that at least some mandates will be rescinded this month.
Some are to be dropped with immediate effect.
In Virginia, a Democratic state senator successfully introduced an amendment to make school masks optional, a measure that won the support of half his party caucus just weeks after the state party bitterly criticized recently elected Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin’s executive order to end mask mandates.
According to a new Monmouth University poll, 70% of Americans now agree that "COVID is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives."
Echelon Insights shows that 55% of voters believe that the virus should be "treated as an endemic disease that will never fully go away." Only 38% still feel that it should be "treated as a public health emergency."
Out of step and out of public sympathy, cleverer Democrats are grasping at whatever straws it takes to stay in power, even if it requires shameless turnabouts on their most strident fearmongering.
The next few months will show whether American voters are smart enough to recognize what the ruling party’s top priority has been all along. It's not freedom.
Paul du Quenoy is president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Georgetown University. Read more — Here.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.