Governor, please, stop it! Stop your nonsensical rationales and false claims about vaccinations and reopening schools. Stop playing us for fools.
There is a lot you and California can be proud of. As you’ve correctly noted, our state now has the lowest rate of positive coronavirus tests in the nation. At least for now, we’re not seeing the surges experienced in the upper Midwest and the Northeast.
You’ve also had a lot to contend with. As many, like us, have urged you during the pandemic to be more aggressive in your policies to stem the spread of the virus, too many Californians have ignored and fought the orders you and local health officials have put in place.
But overreaching with misleading or demonstrably wrong data undermines your credibility. And it will not improve your chances of surviving the recall.
Vaccination deception
When you said in your March 9 speech from empty Dodger Stadium that California had “the most robust vaccination program in the country,” that was bogus. And it probably didn’t fool many of your constituents.
While you later got your inoculation directly from the state health secretary, most of us were hoping to hit the often-random vaccine-appointment jackpot by navigating the chaos of countless web sites and waiting sometimes for hours to get a live person at a call center. We knew better.
At the time of your false claim, California ranked 43rd of 50 states for the percentage of residents fully vaccinated. There’s been improvement since then, but California still ranked 33rd as of Friday.
To be sure, rolling out an unprecedented vaccination program isn’t easy. Last week, you would have been on solid footing to say that our state ranks No. 10 in the portion of people who have received at least one shot.
But boasting, as you did, that we have handed out more shots than all but six other countries in the world ignores the fact that we are the most populous state in a country with the greatest access to vaccine. In other words, you’re just riding the coattails of a national success.
School reopening
Your most convoluted logic comes when you discuss school reopening — when you try to justify your failed plan. Recall backers are likely to make an ad out of your no-harm, no-foul claim last week: “The phrase ‘learning loss’ is questionable because in order to lose something you have to have gained something.”
Wow! What nonsense!
Parents, who have been home with their kids watching them struggle as the academic clock ticked off a full year and counting, are going to love that one. It’s a gaffe that ranks right up there with, say, a maskless dinner at the French Laundry.
Rather than stop there, you rambled on: “At the end of the day, it’s really not learning loss, it’s the unfinished learning that needs to be done in person, that we really need to tackle with intensity and comprehensive interventions over the course of the next number of weeks through the end of this school year, and then, of course, extending into the summer.”
No, governor, summer school alone will not repair the damage.
Toward the end of your appearance, answering a reporter’s question, you seemed to backpedal: “The consequences of delay are profound,” you said. “This is real money we’re putting up. Money is not an object now; it’s an excuse.” That’s what you should have said at the start.
Nation’s worst
If only you had focused on the needs of Californians as much as the concerns of teacher unions. Yes, the Democratic-controlled Legislature has been even worse, making your job that much harder. But rather than use your bully pulpit to insist teachers return to the classroom, you keep trying to argue both sides, while claiming everything is going swimmingly.
“This is the week we’ve been waiting for where we’re seeing massive scaling of our children returning back into schools,” you declared last week. Actually, as of last week, California had the least amount of in-person learning in the nation.
Even though teachers have been jumped to the front of the vaccine lines and billions of state dollars have been committed to in-person learning, as of Friday, according to the Los Angeles Times’ tracker, only 62% of elementary school children, 37% of middle-schoolers and 39% of high school students even had the option of some level of classroom time.
Your reopening effort has been so flawed that many, including you it seems, are now more focused on what will happen in the fall. “We must prepare now for full in-person instruction come this next school year,” you said. You later added, “I expect all our kids to be back, that’s what I expect, with caveats, always with caveats.”
Always with caveats?
Governor, come fall, voters aren’t going to want to listen to caveats.
