Emphasis on the something. After getting ripped for going maskless during a book reading at a Georgia elementary school on Friday, one might have expected Stacey Abrams to apologize for the oversight. A little humility, a little humor, and the whole thing might have blown over long before Republicans had a chance to wring any real political benefit from it.
Instead, Abrams and her team went on the offensive, implying that her critics were motivated by racism rather than the obvious mask-on/mask-off hypocrisy of Democrats (via Twitchy):
BREAKING: Stacey Abrams posted this statement on Instagram in response to viral photo of her maskless in a classroom pic.twitter.com/ZvjqNpGJu5
— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) February 6, 2022
That prompted this understated response from Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Patricia Murphy:
A better response from @staceyabrams would have been, “I made a mistake.” #gapol https://t.co/mx7Yu4o7se
— Patricia Murphy (@politicalinsidr) February 6, 2022
No kidding. What does Black History Month have to do with this issue? Either the mask is necessary around schoolchildren or it’s not regardless of the calendar or the designation of the month. This is just a cheap way of injecting the issue of race into what is actually a major public-health debate over whether children should be forced to mask up in school to protect the adults in the room. Masks, after all, don’t really serve to protect the children, for whom COVID-19 acute infections are exceedingly rare and even less likely to create severe outcomes.
We know this from the CDC’s own data. In an unrelated discussion, I tweeted out that data yesterday:
If you use your mouse to hover over the data on the CDC chart, you can add up the total deaths for those under 18 as 1,243 over the past 2 years of the pandemic.
In 2018-19's flu season, the CDC estimate for deaths in under-18s was 372 for one year.https://t.co/9r78eaUDo0
— Ed Morrissey (@EdMorrissey) February 6, 2022
None of this response, by the way, explains why Abrams has her mask off but the children kept theirs on. Other posed photos from the classroom reading show the same thing: Abrams unmasked while children remain masked. If Abrams only took the masks off for the pictures, why didn’t the children take theirs off for the pictures? Is it because Abrams was more concerned about getting campaign photos than public health?
The answer to that is where it gets worse:
The Abrams’ campaign shot back that it was “shameful” how Republicans used a Black History Month reading event to fuel a “pitiful and predictable” critique.
Her campaign said she wore a mask to the event and only removed it so she could be heard by students watching remotely and for a handful of photos on the condition that everyone around her was wearing face-coverings.
Video footage of the event reviewed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows Abrams arrived at the podium wearing a mask, taking it off just before she began to speak.
In other words, Abrams personally required everyone else to mask up while she took hers off for publicity photos. The excuse from the campaign is that Abrams needed to take off the mask so “she could be heard.” In the first place, that’s nonsense — people speak through masks on a daily basis these days. But more importantly, imagine how students feel about “be[ing] heard” in school when forced to wear masks all day for the benefit of the adults.
Rather than answer the actual criticism, Abrams and her team are attempting a sleight-of-hand to fight on the only ground Abrams knows. Leading off a response to legit criticism on masks by mentioning Black History Month is as blatant a race-card response as you’ll ever see. It’s nothing but cheap demagoguery, but then again, that’s pretty much all Abrams has ever offered.
