Florida Governor Ron DeSantis told students standing behind him at a press conference to take off their masks, calling the masks “Covid theater.”
“You do not have to wear those masks. Please take them off. Honestly, it’s not doing anything. We’ve gotta stop with this Covid theater. So if you wanna wear it, fine, but this is ridiculous,” he said.
The students were of Hillsborough School District, who were attending the governor’s press conference at the University of South Florida where he announced investments in cybersecurity workforce education. Most of the students behind him would immediately take off their masks.
The governor has recently gone on an all-out attack on forced masking, saying in a video released across his social that a “a 9 to 5 job should not be a N-95 job.”
“Simply relying on outdated CDC guidance when the experience has completely undercut that is not really a reasonable thing to do at this point,” DeSantis said via video.
The governor talked about his personal experiences in that statement, saying “Every time I go to these places, I’ll be in these big events and you have all these people having such a good time and the poor servers are forced to mask and I will ask them, ‘Are you allowed to take the mask off?’ They say ‘not yet. They’re all waiting for it. They all want to be liberated. They want to be treated normally,” DeSantis said.
Authored by Roberto Wakerell-Cruz via the Post Millennial
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