Quit the Delta Panic

With COVID cases rising as the Delta variant spreads, the best thing our leaders can do is encourage the hesitant to get vaccinated. Yet many are instead undermining confidence in the shots. That’s the message sent by calling for — and in some cases instituting — a return to mask mandates, even for the vaxxed.

“Indoor mask use in NYC is falling — in delis, stores, subways, movie theaters etc. We need to reverse this trend,” tweeted City Council Health Committee Chairman Mark Levine. “It’s time to renew the indoor mask mandate, including for those who are vax’d.”

Los Angeles County is already back to requiring masks indoors. The American Academy of Pediatrics just called for universal masking in classrooms for anyone over 2 — including the vaccinated — and Dr. Anthony Fauci quickly agreed, calling masking children and vaccinated teens and teachers “a reasonable thing to do.”

But it’s not reasonable — and neither is needlessly stoking fear and uncertainty, which undermines the economy’s recovery and the livelihoods that depend on it.

The official gloom boosts vaccine hesitancy, too. Why get jabbed if life is going back into lockdown — and if you’d still have to worry about every new strain, as officials imply when they insist even the vaccinated must re-mask?

The panic is completely unwarranted. Yes, Delta is more transmissible. But, as White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki noted Monday, 99.5 percent of those being hospitalized for or dying from COVID are unvaccinated.

The vaccines almost eliminate the risk of severe illness and death from all variants. Public Health England found that Pfizer’s vaccine is 96 percent effective at preventing hospitalization due to the Delta variant. And the United Kingdom, where Delta surged, has seen new cases drop these last few days, from 54,674 on Saturday to 39,950 on Monday.

Indeed, the data on Delta are “reassuring,” Drs. Leslie Bienen and Monica Gandhi note in The Wall Street Journal: Delta cases actually correlate with lower hospitalization rates.

And calling for kids to mask up is ridiculous, Delta or no. Johns Hopkins School of Medicine prof Marty Makary and his research team analyzed childhood COVID cases and found “a mortality rate of zero among children without a pre-existing medical condition such as leukemia.”

As President Biden rightly notes, “The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated.” He should rein in Fauci and his other allies undermining vaccine confidence: 90 million eligible Americans still haven’t gotten a jab, and their lives may depend on it.