by Kerry Dougherty

It’s a miracle!

After two years of constantly hectoring us to wear masks, public health officials and Democratic leaders have now decided that it’s time to lose the face diapers.

Just in time for the State of the Union Address! Exquisite timing.

Remember, this is just two weeks after Virginia Democrats howled that Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s emergency amendment — the one that activated on March 1 a law forbidding the forced masking of Virginia’s school children — would kill people.

Will the left-wing harpies in the General Assembly now praise the governor for leading the way?

Last Friday the CDC did an about-face, revising its COVID risk formula. That magically transformed 90% of the country from being high risk, to more than 70% being low risk.

Science!

The CDC wants you to believe that six weeks of dropping cases and deaths brought America to a new place in the pandemic.

That’s a lie.

Cases and deaths are closely tracking where they were a year ago. In fact, on Sunday more Americans died of COVID than died last year on February 27. This year, with vaccines widely available, 1,876 died. In 2021, when few were vaccinated, 1,847 perished.

Still, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky merrily proclaimed that most of the country can now “take a break” from masks, implying, of course, that face coverings will be a part of American life forever.

Oh, and kids can now go to school maskless! For a while, anyway.

With that pronouncement, benevolent Democratic dictators — governors and mayors — across the country began ripping the masks off little faces.

Best of all, members of Congress who were being fined for showing bare faces just last week will now be able to attend the State of the Union Address maskless. (As long as they provide a negative COVID test.)

The optics will be marvelous!

This is naked politics masquerading as health policy. The new CDC recommendations are designed to allow a deeply unpopular president claim some sort of victory over COVID in his speech. With inflation at a 40-year high, the southern border wide open and with the U.S. buying oil from Russia, effectively helping to fund Vladimir Putin’s hideous war on Ukraine, Biden has nothing he can point to as a success. His miserable poll numbers reflect his multiple failures.

A new Washington Post poll shows Biden’s approval rating at 37%. How low can he go?

If Biden isn’t able to turn this around soon, the mid-terms will be a bloodbath.

Hence, the new mask guidelines.

The left used COVID to do more than simply force people to wear useless masks against their will. They used the pandemic to loosen election rules and to allow mail-in ballots, to close churches and deprive children of education, to force unwilling workers to take vaccines and to divide a deeply divided country even more.

These new mask recommendations, without an acknowledgment that the mandates were cruel and did almost nothing to stop the spread of the virus, will just be more hot air from Washington.

This column has been republished with permission from Kerry: Unemployed & Unedited.