With COVID Numbers Falling, Restrictions Easing, Will Cooper Be Lifting Mask Mandate? Don’t Hold Your Breath

RALEIGH – It’s hard to let go of fear. Harder still, is letting go of the authority that fearful people have placed in you.

Such is the nature of Governor Roy Cooper’s painfully slow ‘reopening’ process. It’s a dilemma extending from the arbitrary nature of the restrictions themselves. If the reasoning and metrics for implementing the extraordinary measures are more or less plucked from thin air, establishing an objective framework for removing is impossible.

Even so, the statewide curfew has been lifted; capacity limits have been eased at restaurants, bars, and other event venues; and, more and more people receive the COVID vaccines every day. So, what about one of the most controversial edicts Cooper enacted — the statewide mask mandate — are they considering lifting that?

‘Maybe,’ Cooper waffled in response to the question in Thursday’s press briefing, after announcing the easing of restrictions.

“We’ve been discussing that, and obviously we have just been working tirelessly to make sure as many people as we possibly can get vaccinated,” said Cooper.

Even though posing the question itself effectively breaks the seal on the conversation around lifting the mask mandate, here again Cooper indicates that he will drag his feet for much longer.

When faced with these questions, Cooper cannot bring himself to acknowledge the reality surrounding the actual nature of COVID risks currently presenting themselves in North Carolina. To do so would undermine and invalidate the last year of fear mongering to foment Pandemic Panic.

Instead, the only avenue available within the Pandemic Panic framework the Left has set up for all of us is to lean into more strong-arming:

“We can have significantly fewer restrictions and return to normalcy, but what’s going to be required is as many people as possible getting the vaccine. And there is some concern that we might have a large portion of the population that is hesitant about it and may refuse, and that’s why I mentioned earlier that we are going to depend on doctors and ministers and family members and friends to push and cajole those who may be hesitant about getting the vaccine.”

Want to live freely, citizen? Get the vaccine. Under the fear framework, that’s the only option. Doesn’t really sound like a proposition made to a free people, does it?

What’s more, from Cooper to Dr. Fauci, have you noticed that this focus on vaccinating a critical mass of the population, under the pretense of working towards herd immunity, COMPLETELY ignores the MILLIONS of people who have already had and recovered from the coronavirus.

Fauci asserts 70-80 percent of the population needs to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity, and stooges like Cooper collectively fall in line to emphasize the necessity of vaccinating such large swaths of the population if we ever expect a  ‘return to normalcy,’ but others point out just why this is nonsense.

No matter; Cooper and the purveyors of Pandemic Panic have repeatedly proven themselves incapable of admitting such mistakes in logic throughout this ordeal. Which makes you think if they were ever really mistakes, or rather examples of the Left hyping a crisis to which they could apply their reliably authoritarian tendencies.