With the Coronavirus vaccine being distributed nationwide, many U.S. states have started lifting or reducing their mask mandates, and their citizens have had some very extreme reactions to the news. In Idaho some parents and their children travelled to the state capital and burned their masks right in front of the building to show they no longer need them. The video of this incident was circulating around twitter on Saturday.

Before the incident at a board meeting on Thursday the 4th, Idaho’s District Seven’s Public Health Director, Geri Rackow, said that since hospital cases of the virus are decreasing ,the district can lift their mask mandate. But Idaho Governor Brad Little had never even issued, let alone enforced a mask mandate for the state; only some districts in the state instituted a county-wide regulation to help stop the spread of the virus. Many cities, including Idaho’s Boise, have continued to enforce mask usage and follow other safety precautions.

According to state Representative Karey Hanks (R), the masks have done more bad than good to the people, as she indicated in a conference held at the Idaho Statehouse, ” … on the physical and emotional and even mental injuries to our bodies, and possibly even our souls.” She used this  reasoning to justify why some of the citizens of Idaho are so keen to get rid of the masks, but this does not stop cases of Coronavirus from rising.

Since the start of the pandemic Idaho has already confirmed around 172,000 cases, and has already had more than 1,800 deaths.  Even though this number of cases is less then most other U.S. states, over 15% of Idaho’s total population has already caught the virus.