“It’s not a pivot,” Rep. Sean Maloney (D-NY) tells Willie Geist on Morning Joe today, “it’s an inflection point.” The rapid abandonment of COVID-19 mandates in blue states certainly looks like a pivot, especially while the CDC steadfastly refuses to provide any metrics or off-ramps for governors to follow. The stampede away from mandates while Joe Biden insists that such actions are “premature” certainly resembles a political pivot a lot more than an epidemiological inflection point.

Pivot or inflection point, the DCCC chair seems very worried that Democrats have fallen in love with mandates. And he should be:

Co-host Willie Geist asked about Maloney’s past comments when he said, “It’s time to give people their lives back.”

“That felt to a lot of people like a pivot,” Geist said. “We’ve seen the dominos fall in blue states starting with New Jersey and Gov. Murphy last week getting rid of the mask mandates. What has changed for you and what do you see ahead?”

“It’s not a pivot, it’s an inflection point,” Maloney said. The DCCC chair noted that with good vaccine coverage, therapeutics and access to testing, these mask mandates are no longer necessary.

“We as Democrats should not be, out of some sense of correctness, falling in love with [mask] mandates when they aren’t necessary,” Maloney said. “We should get rid of them as quickly as we responsibly can.”

It’s definitely a pivot, and in large part because these mandates have been disconnected from “the science” for the last several months. Vaccine mandates for access to public spaces ignore the fact that vaccination doesn’t stop transmission of the Omicron variant, and likely not the Delta variant either — as the CDC has acknowledged. Masks may have mitigation effects for adults in crowded indoor spaces, generally speaking with COVID-19. However, the data on Omicron doesn’t show any appreciable difference on community transmission rates as reported to the CDC between mask-mandate and non-mask-mandate states (although it did appear to have a correlation to amplitude with Delta).

And of course, no one can point to any data which shows schools as vectors for community transmission or that children have a significant risk for acute COVID-19 infections. And yet, this is what the purveyors of “the science” keep saying about masking children in schools:

Despite science, Dr. Fauci claims “it is risky” to stop forcing kids to wear facemasks

"It’s understandable why people want to take masks off the kids. But, right now, given the level of activity that we have, it is risky.” pic.twitter.com/K3mLDna2UA

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 17, 2022

Really? Let’s take a look at the “level of activity” for pediatric cases over the last four months, according to CDC data:

In every region except Region 2, pediatric diagnoses of COVID-19 are plunging. Region 2 includes New York and New Jersey (along with Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands), where Democratic governors just canceled their mandates for adults. Regions 6 and 4 (the southern US excluding the Southwest), where mask mandates in schools and everywhere else got canceled in late 2020 or early 2021, show very little difference in patterns of pediatric diagnoses, and look far better than Region 9 (CA, AZ, NV) with its heavy reliance on such mandates.

What about deaths? Again, the CDC data from the last four months puts this risk into perspective as well:

As we can expect from the actual science, the rate of deaths correlated to a COVID-19 diagnosis (causation is still not being measured, don’t forget) hits hardest among the oldest three demographic groups. As of January 8, the COVID-19/Omicron-correlated death rates for age groups under 18 were:

• 0-4: 0.06
• 5-11: 0.03
• 12-15: 0.04
• 16-17: 0.07

As of last week, the death rates for all of these groups in CDC data were 0.00 except for 12-15YOs, which had a death rate of 0.01. The death rates for all age groups are declining in this chart, although some of that is an artifact of delayed reporting. Nevertheless, the “activity” level is dropping anyway in all regions. Worth noting, too: the death rate for Region 2’s elderly spiked to 49.69 even with mask mandates in place, while non-mask-mandate regions 4 (11.75) and 6 (31.33) fared much better.

That’s not to say that masks might not mitigate risk in certain situations, but it does show that children are at very low risk in all regions regardless of mask mandates. School mandates didn’t have any impact on transmissions or deaths, at least when one compares the CDC data between these regions. People should be free to wear masks as a choice for mitigation, but there isn’t any “science” which demonstrates that mandates produce significantly different outcomes, and especially not for children.

The only reason these mandates still exist, especially in light of vaccinations and therapeutics, is that policymakers did “fall in love” with them. More accurately put, Democratic executives fell in love with the power that they got in an emergency and don’t want “off ramps” that will wrest that power to dictate living conditions for constituents. Voters have begun to figure that out, which is why Maloney’s sounding the alarm and trying to pivot now.