"Moderate" Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger (D.) filled her final cabinet position with a Yale University leader who advocated for the masking of two-year-old children during the COVID-19 pandemic and pushed for mandatory vaccinations.
Spanberger on May 1 tapped David Wilkinson, who heads Yale's Tobin Center for Economic Policy and served as a senior adviser in the Obama White House, to be her "chief transformation officer," a role former governor Glenn Youngkin (R.) created to enhance the "effectiveness and efficiency of our government." Wilkinson said in a statement that he would help "create a government that better responds to the needs of families, businesses, and local communities."
Yet as an adjunct professor at Yale's Child Study Center, Wilkinson coauthored studies that pushed COVID-19 policies that were highly divisive in Virginia and helped turn once-mundane school board meetings into battle zones.
Wilkinson's January 2021 study argued that "masking children 2 years and older can be an important component of risk mitigation strategies" after finding that child care centers that reported having mandatory face covering rules had a 13 percent lower risk of closure due to a COVID-19 case. It also dismissed concerns of potential "social and developmental delays when younger children wear a face mask for prolonged periods," arguing that research pushing those conclusions were "point-in-time studies" and that two-year-olds "recognize spoken words better through an opaque mask compared with a clear face shield."
Other studies around the same time, however, found that masks impaired toddlers' ability to recognize emotions and raised concerns that prolonged exposure could harm their social and emotional development during a critical window. Since then, research has found that COVID-19 mitigation strategies in conjunction did cause long-term developmental issues in children and harm to their psychological well-being. And while masks can effectively prevent COVID-19 transmission in theory, children, especially those younger than five, would frequently take them off, studies found.
Wilkinson's appointment is another indication Spanberger may not be the moderate she portrayed herself as on the campaign trail. She backed an effort to gerrymander Virginia's congressional map after indicating on the campaign trail that she had no plans to do so and signed a slew of proposed constitutional amendments on abortion, voting rights for felons, and same-sex marriage. Mandatory masking for children was highly divisive during the pandemic, with an August 2021 Gallup poll finding that 48 percent of parents favored the requirement, while 41 percent were opposed.
Vaccine mandates were also contentious in Virginia—former governor Terry McAuliffe (D.) supported them during his 2021 campaign and ultimately lost his gubernatorial bid by more than 2 points.
Yet a month after the election, Wilkinson copublished a paper pushing for vaccine mandates for child care providers after finding that unvaccinated employees were less likely to follow practices like social distancing that could help prevent spread of COVID-19. "That unprotected child care providers continue to congregate within a vulnerable child care program may support a role for mandatory vaccination to reduce the number of susceptible hosts and the risk of a classroom outbreak," Wilkinson and his coauthors argued.
They also pointed to the "politicization of masking and vaccination" that likely played a role in the "nonadherence to multiple types of preventative health behaviors."
Democrats have continued to face criticism over policies they issued during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly long-term school closures. While Spanberger was not in the governor's mansion until well after the issue faded, appearing to side with unpopular positions could further hinder her as she already faces a historically low approval rating and has just suffered a devastating loss after the Supreme Court of Virginia slapped down a gerrymandering effort she aggressively supported.
As an Obama White House senior adviser, Wilkinson headed the administration's Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, which sought to "advance opportunity, equality, and justice by creating a more outcomes-driven government and social sector." Among the programs he oversaw was "My Brother's Keeper," an initiative intended to "address persistent opportunity gaps faced by boys and young men of color and ensure that all young people can reach their full potential."
Reception among the black community was less than rosy. More than 1,000 women of color and 200 black men signed letters demanding gender equality in the program. The women wrote that they were "profoundly troubled about the exclusion of women and girls of color."
"The need to acknowledge the crisis facing boys should not come at the expense of addressing the stunted opportunities for girls who live in the same households, suffer in the same schools, and struggle to overcome a common history of limited opportunities caused by various forms of discrimination," they wrote. "We simply cannot agree that the effects of these conditions on women and girls should pale to the point of invisibility, and are of such little significance that they warrant zero attention in the messaging, research and resourcing of this unprecedented Initiative."
Two years after Wilkinson left the White House, when My Brother's Keeper was under the Obama Foundation, the program honored Quintez Brown as a "rising face" and selected him as one of 22 students selected to attend the inaugural MBK Rising! Summit in 2019. He went on to be sentenced to 17 years and 6 months in prison last year for shooting at then-Louisville, Ky., mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg (D.) in 2022.
Neither Wilkinson nor Spanberger responded to requests for comment.
