Paul LePage is serving up a fresh batch of malarkey for Maine

It’s so nice to have ex-Governor Meanie back in town!

Paul LePage, seeking to reclaim the Blaine House, has returned to Maine from his Florida tax haven to stage a repeat performance that showcases his talents for demeaning people and disseminating misinformation.

The former governor gave a radio interview in January in which he held forth on a number of topics — including advocating for eliminating COVID-19 vaccination requirements and lengthening the school year to get “our children back on par.”

Maine, he said, should recognize that it has “completely lost the battle of slowing the spread” of COVID-19 and focus instead of minimizing the damage caused by the pandemic, including allowing students to “have a normal life.”

That’s GOP code language for “damn the risk, get back to business as usual” — a favorite theme of Ron DeSantis, Republican governor of LePage’s adopted state of Florida.

While it wasn’t entirely unreasonable for LePage to propose lengthening the school year to give students an opportunity to catch up on classroom time lost due to COVID-19, it’s what he said next that persuaded me he’s still the same guy who once boasted of being “Trump before Trump.”

If there are vaccine mandates for health care workers, LePage opined, they should be imposed on welfare recipients as well. After all, he said, “they can travel and mingle much easier than a person who’s at work.”

LePage’s remarks represented an indirect dig at his successor, Gov. Janet Mills, for her handling of the pandemic and a direct insult to welfare recipients for — well — being on welfare. His comments also contained a grab bag of assertions that were just plain wrong.

First, Maine has not “completely lost the battle” to slow the pandemic — far from it. Per capita it has had the lowest reported COVID-19 case rate and fourth lowest death rate of any state from the start of the pandemic through early February 2022. Like the rest of the country, we’ve experienced a recent spike due to the Omicron variant. Still, we had the 14th lowest infection rate on a seven-day average of all U.S. states and territories during the first week of February.

Second, I doubt that many welfare recipients have the time or money to be idlers with nothing better to do than “travel and mingle.” Maine’s primary welfare program is TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). According to the Department of Health and Human Services website, TANF “provides temporary cash assistance to financially support families in need” as well as “work preparation services to help them re-enter the workforce or find more stable employment.”

To be eligible for TANF a person has to unemployed or underemployed, earn no or very low income, and have a child 18 or younger, be pregnant, or be 18 or younger and head of a household. There’s a lifetime limit of 60 months for receiving benefits. Cash payments depend on a family’s size and income and are hardly generous. The top payment for a family of three, for example, is only $610 a month ($7,320 a year).

The responsibility for caring for minor children and either holding a job, training for a career, or searching for work, combined with the relatively low level of, and lifetime limitation on, benefits doesn’t provide TANF recipients with a lot of time or money for socializing or globe-trotting.

Besides, if we’re going to require welfare recipients to get vaccinated because they receive government funding, why not do the same for taxpayers who claim tax credits, college students who receive federally backed student loans, home buyers who take out FHA mortgages, people covered by Medicare insurance, or business owners who get SBA loans?

Compared to welfare recipients, workers in certain occupations are probably at far greater risk of contracting and spreading the virus, and healthcare is at the top of the list.

While it’s hard to find reliable statistics on workplace spread, a Nov. 21, 2021, Washington State Department of Health study showed that of the state’s lab-confirmed cases for which there existed employment data, 19% were in health care and social assistance, 12% in retail trade, 9% each in manufacturing and construction, and 8% in accommodation and food services. Not surprisingly these occupations all require an on-site presence and personal interactions with co-workers or customers.

Third, schools, the very institutions LePage wants to keep open for more days per year, have the potential to be the worst breeding ground for the virus in the absence of rigorous public health precautions like ventilation, masking, distancing and vaccinations.

In his book “The Premonition,” Michael Lewis, best-selling author of “Liar’s Poker,” “Money Ball” and “The Blindside,” tells the story of an Albuquerque, New Mexico, middle-school student, Laura Glass, who, with the help of her scientist father, created a computer model in 2003 as a class project for describing the spread of a pandemic.

Glass’s idea led to an academic paper by her father, which three years later came to the attention of an ad hoc White House group working on a plan for containing a theoretical pandemic. Thanks to the Glass model, one of the chief strategies devised in the plan was to immediately close down schools at the onset of an epidemic. Why? Because the high density of school-age children in cramped classrooms and on buses, combined with the high frequency of their social interactions, made them potential super-spreaders.

In short, Paul LePage is peddling malarkey about COVID and doing so in a way which disparages the current governor and a whole class of poor people — welfare recipients. And he’s just getting warmed up for his campaign. Who knows what outrageous claims he’ll make once he hits his stride?

Perhaps LePage should go back to Florida, where official lies about public health have become public policy.

Better yet, maybe he should challenge Florida’s governor for re-election using the campaign slogan, “I was DeSantis before DeSantis.”

Elliott Epstein is a trial lawyer with Andrucki & King in Lewiston. His Rearview Mirror column, which has appeared in the Sun Journal for 16 years, analyzes current events in an historical context. He is also the author of “Lucifer’s Child,” a book about the notorious 1984 child murder of Angela Palmer. He may be contacted at epsteinel@yahoo.com