TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — As cases of COVID-19 surged across the state, Gov. Ron DeSantis held a secret meeting in the Capitol on Monday with medical professionals, underlining his opposition to mask mandates for students.
DeSantis has said he fears efforts at the federal or local level to impose a mask mandate for K-12 school students and said he would call a special session of the Legislature to prevent that from happening.
“Our view is that this should absolutely not be imposed. It should not be mandated,” DeSantis said at the meeting. “And I know our Legislature feels strongly about it, such that if, if you started to see a push from the feds or some of these local school districts, I know they’re interested in coming in, even in a special session to be able to provide protections for parents and kids who just want to breathe freely and don’t want to be suffering under these masks during the school year.”
All central and South Florida school districts have decided masks will be optional for the 2021-22 school year, though some parents are asking them to reconsider given the surge in new COVID-19 cases.
The press was not notified of the meeting until hours after it happened, but DeSantis’ office provided a video and transcript of the meeting afterwards. In doing so, DeSantis was able to avoid questions about the surge in cases of COVID-19, which has caused alarm from local officials around the state.
One panelist, Dr. Cody Meissner, said the American Academy of Pediatrics was “virtue signaling” by recommending all students and teachers wear masks, regardless of vaccination or prior infection status.
“We know that a lot of people are going to test positive for COVID-19,” Meissner said. “This is an extremely infectious virus. And just being positive is no different than for example, a person who is asymptomatic and has Group A streptococcus in their pharynx.”
Meissner is a professor of pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine and chief of its Division of Pediatric Infectious Disease. He also served on the American Academy of Pediatrics’ infectious disease committee and said he has “not had much success at even presenting an alternative perspective” on that committee.
Another panelist, Los Angeles-based clinical psychiatrist Mark McDonald, called his native California a “medical apartheid state” because of the mask mandates there.
“My position is simple: Masking children is child abuse,” McDonald said.
DeSantis has resisted any mask mandates in the general population, signing an executive order prohibiting local governments from collecting fines for those violating mask orders. He later signed a bill into law requiring state approval for local emergency orders lasting longer than 10 days.
Meanwhile, hospitals around the state are seeing an influx of COVID-19 patients. AdventHealth officials said Monday there were 862 patients in its central Florida hospitals, near the peak of about 900 in January.
Statewide, the Florida Department of Health reported 73,166 new COVID-19 cases last week, more than 27,000 than the week before. Test positivity is currently more than 15%, its highest rate since July 2020.
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Orlando Sentinel staff writer Leslie Postal contributed to this article.
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