CDC makes incremental move on indoor masks, as New York City remains stubborn after Savannah joins other cities with mask mandates

By Progress New York Staff

Updated 28 July 2021 13:50 Mayor Bill de Blasio (WFP-New York City) increasingly finds himself out of step with the leadership in several U.S. metro regions and in the top Federal health ministry, as pandemic public health policy once again embraces universal indoor mask requirements on individuals, regardless of vaccination status, due to the increasing wave of COVID-19 infections, according to a syndicated report published by Axios.

On Monday, Mayor Van Johnson (D-Savannah) said that the former capital of Georgia would enforce the return of the indoor mask mandate through 25 Aug., according to a report published by the Savannah Morning News. Each of the City and County of St. Louis also began to enforce an indoor mask requirement on Monday. They joined San Mateo and Los Angeles counties in California, where health ministers had earlier embraced a return to indoor mask mandates in the face of the Delta variant outbreak gripping the Nation. County employees in Las Vegas and New Orleans also face mask mandates, according to a report published by ABC News.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention planned to announce a return of indoor mask mandates in hot spots and a mandate for indoor mask requirements in public schools, according to news reports.

It’s not known how Mayor de Blasio is responding to growing criticism on social media over his rejection of an earlier standard of care that he once supported. Despite the CDC’s planned moves, Mayor de Blasio reportedly said he was still assessing “next steps,” according to a transcript of his press conference remarks of Tuesday morning. For this report, the press office supporting Mayor de Blasio did not answer an interview request and did not immediately say when Mayor de Blasio would return to wearing masks indoors.

On Monday, Mayor de Blasio announced a requirement that municipal employees would be obligated from 13 Sept. to show proof of vaccination or weekly COVID-19 test results, according to a transcript of his press conference remarks of Monday. A union representing emergency medical workers for the New York City Fire Department denounced the requirement, claiming that the mayor was strong-arming EMS personnel into taking vaccines that have yet to be granted full approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which regulates prescription medication, amongst other complaints, according to a report published by The Hill. Coronavirus vaccines are currently authorised for distribution under emergency use authorisation, the first one of which as granted in Dec. 2020.

The haves are very entitled. In keeping with such, the de Blasio administration disclosed on Monday that City employees would be denied pay if they refused to comply with the vaccination or testing mandate, according to the Monday press conference transcript. Politicians have also managed to change the media narrative by blaming the unvaccinated for variant outbreaks after Democrats in charge in Washington, DC, encouraged the economic reöpening with low vaccine uptake metrics.

The masking decision by San Mateo County was the first in the Bay Area, as San Francisco endures a wave of COVID-19 infections that has become the second-greatest since the inception of the pandemic, despite a higher vaccine uptake than New York City’s. Mayor de Blasio’s continued refusal to embrace a universal masking mandate followed an editorial published by the New York Post that Wall Street banks opposed universal indoor masking. The élite bankers have claimed that a universal indoor masking requirement would make it difficult for employees to return to largely empty office buildings.

As reported by Progress New York, approx. 70 per cent. of Blacks and 60 per cent. of Latinxs remain unvaccinated in New York City. The current wave of COVID-19 infections is modeled to triple the daily death rate by October, according to a report published by NPR, the national network of public radio stations.