Five Vermont Towns Opt to Extend Mask Mandate Another Month

Five towns in Vermont opted to extend their mask mandates another month, nearly two years after the start of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.

The Vermont legislature wrapped up 2021 by passing a measure allowing local governments to impose their own mask requirements. Republican Gov. Phil Scott emphatically approved the measure, pitching it as a way to avoid issuing a statewide mask mandate. In a November letter to members of the legislature, Scott said the legislation had to be “limited to facial covering requirements indoors within a municipality’s jurisdiction (except schools, which shall remain governed by the policies set forth by the local school board) for the specific, and exclusive, purpose of addressing COVID-19.”

“We want to make sure we are keeping local people safe, businesses safe and if towns feel like one way to do that is through masking, they should be able to make that decision themselves,” Sen. President Pro Tem Becca Balint (D) said at the time.

Under the legislation, towns can reevaluate the mandates on a 30-day basis. As a result, five towns opted to extend their mask mandate another month. Those towns include Brattleboro, Essex, Williston, South Burlington, and Richmond.

The extension comes as the Biden administration continues to push masks on the American people as President Biden goes far beyond his plan for “just” 100 days of masking.

“I — you know, I know we all wish that we could finally be done with wearing masks. I get it. But there is — they’re a really important tool to stop the spread, especially of a highly transmittable omicron variant,” Biden said in a speech last week. “So, please, please wear the mask.”

The news coincides with reports of the Biden administration preparing to distribute roughly 400 million N95 masks following updated U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance.

Nearly two years into the pandemic and after one year of widely available vaccines, the federal health agency is still deeming masking a “critical public health tool” and contending that “any mask is better than no mask.”