If you read corporate news over the last year, it would be easy to believe that Republicans hate science. If someone didn't want to wear masks and needed to tell you about it, it was a right wing person being displayed on social media. 

Yet as the pandemic died down, we were being told we still needed to wear masks outdoors. And even after both doses of a vaccine plus a generous waiting period. And those cries of doom if we did not obey "the science" were overwhelmingly on the left. Except that wasn't science at all. Outdoor transmission of COVID-19 is negligible yet you wouldn't know that if you listened to Democrat Dr. Rochelle Walensky, head of the CDC, who not only misrepresented data on outdoor transmission risk, she did so by an entire order of magnitude.

In California, Governor Gavin Newsom defied the science and said those in the state had to go masked for another month. He doesn't trust vaccines and it is no surprise; he is from San Francisco, which has so much anti-vaccine sentiment, along with other coastal areas, we had to pass a law to eliminate arbitrary vaccine exemptions for kids that led to outbreaks of old timey diseases like Whooping Cough.

More recently the Governor signaled he wants to keep the Emergency Powers he granted himself and will only remove the mask mandate if political appointees on the state OSHA board say he should.

Do vaccines work or not? If they work, masks in parks and other hygiene theater are ridiculous. Most pro-science people know they work, just like pro-science people know solar does not and that 'organic' food is an intellectual placebo. It is clear that those on the left running the state, and certainly on social media, still don't believe in vaccines. Nothing else explains the fetish with having vaccines, double masks, and desire for social authoritarianism from centralized government.

There is some good news in all this; after 15 years of trying, a way was discovered to get left-wing people to stand up to the anti-vax fringe - the anti-vax fringe simply had to become Republicans.