Prairie State Wire

Wirepoints President Ted Dabrowski has grown tired of what he sees as the Pritzker way.

"It's always fear and confusion,” Dabrowski said in a Cities929.com interview shortly after Gov. J.B. Pritzker moved to impose a universal mask mandate on public and private school students.

“There's a lot of information that the public needs in order to start operating normally because we're a year and a half into this,” he said. “We've got to start getting back to some normalcy. And the way they present the data doesn't allow us to really understand or trust them. A lot of people don't trust what's coming out of the officials, you know, either at the CDC or at the local level."

The governor’s executive order also requires masks for teachers and staff at pre-kindergarten through 12th grade schools regardless of vaccination status, and state employees working in congregate facilities such as long-term care facilities and veterans' homes.

Pritzker’s latest edict on masks comes as University of Illinois Chicago respiratory protection professors Dr. Lisa M Brosseau and Dr. Margaret Sietsema wrote on the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy website that "cloth masks and face coverings are likely to have limited impact on lowering COVID-19 transmission because they have minimal ability to prevent the emission of small particles and offer limited personal protection with respect to small particle inhalation."

Brosseau and Sietsema concluded “we don’t recommend requiring the general public who do not have symptoms of COVID-19 like illness to routinely wear cloth or surgical masks" at least partly because they argue there is no scientific evidence they are effective.

While Pritzker continues to defend his actions as part of his plan to keep residents safe, pointing to how the Centers for Disease Control is now also recommending universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students and visitors to K-12 schools regardless of vaccination status, critics like Dabrowski view it as just the latest instance of the governor acting like a dictator.

"School districts, they can be making their own decisions about whether to open or not based on local COVID conditions, what the public wants,” Dabrowski said. “But instead, we've got another edict coming down from the governor, and that just doesn't make sense anymore. We've had 10 deaths under the age of 17 in Illinois, and most of those kids had had some serious health issues. So for the normal, healthy kid ... it's more risky to send your kids out on his bicycle or to the lake than it is to fear COVID at this point."

In-person learning is slated to resume at school across the state over the next several weeks.