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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) told Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson Thursday the media accusing him of “berating” students into removing their masks during a press conference are the true bullies for helping federal health officials over the past two years force children to wear cloth masks that have never been effective against the spread of COVID-19.

Appearing on Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, DeSantis responded to critics in the media who accused him of “berating” and “scolding” students who appeared with him during a press conference Wednesday, wearing masks.

“You do not have to wear those masks,” DeSantis told the students. “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.”

Carlson played a montage of criticism hurled at the governor from prominent leftwing media personalities (see video below):

DeSantis responded:

Well, Tucker, none of the adults were wearing masks and it seemed to me that someone told those kids they had to do it. So, I just wanted to make it very clear they do not need to be doing it. Obviously, in Florida, it’s a free state, you can do it. But, I think it’s also important to point out that there’s no reason to do it for young and healthy kids, especially.

DeSantis continued that Florida has never had a mask mandate, and observed that his health department’s guidance has urged people “not to wear these cloth masks.”

“People have been lied to for two years,” the governor asserted, adding…

DeSantis said the true bullies are those who have been lying to children for political convenience:

Tucker, bullying is locking kids out of school, which they did. Bullying is forcing kids to wear masks for eight hours a day, which they did for two years and are only stopping now because the polling changed. Bullying is kicking people out of work because of vaccine mandates. We fought all of those policies in Florida, we lifted people up, and we liberated them from local school boards and governments that imposed them.

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo confirmed Thursday the notion that masks have saved lives during the coronavirus pandemic is “a lie, and it needs to stop and people need to unbelieve it,” reported the Orlando Sentinel…

In December, epidemiologist Dr. Paul Alexander compiled at Brownstone Institute “more than 150 comparative studies and articles on mask ineffectiveness and harms.”

Alexander prefaced the evidence with this statement, citing the Great Barrington Declaration, authored in October 2020 by Drs. Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya, and which now has over 928,000 signatures:

Because we saw very early on that the lockdowns were the single greatest mistake in public health history. We knew the history and knew they would not work. We also knew very early of COVID’s risk stratification. Sadly, our children will bear the catastrophic consequences and not just educationally, of the deeply flawed school closure policy for decades to come (particularly our minority children who were least able to afford this). Many are still pressured to wear masks and punished for not doing so.

“To date, the evidence has been stable and clear that masks do not work to control the virus and they can be harmful and especially to children,” Alexander asserted.

Los Angeles-based psychiatrist Dr. Mark McDonald, author of United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis, has also railed against mask mandates and school lockdowns, asserting they have harmed children.

In December, McDonald told The Epoch Times’ The Nation Speaks that pandemic lockdown policies and mask mandates are tied to lower IQ, signs of social brain damage, and increasing behavior disorders