Arizona House Passes Anti-Mask Bill After GOP Sponsor Points Out Masks Weren’t Needed For AIDS During 80s

The Arizona Daily Star reports:

A lawmaker persuaded the Arizona House to let businesses ignore mask mandates to stem COVID spread partly by arguing they weren’t needed decades ago to stop the spread of AIDS. On a 31-28 party-line vote Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House approved legislation that says business owners need not enforce any state, city, town or county requirement for people to wear a mask. The measure now goes to the GOP-controlled Senate.

The sponsor, Rep. Joseph Chaplik, a first-term Republican legislator from Scottsdale, said his House Bill 2770 would give businesses the choice of whether to enforce the mandates that many communities already adopted. He cited HIV “that was going to wipe our global destruction of human bodies with AIDS. We heard about that in the ’80s,” Chaplik said. “Yet no masks were required.”

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