The two hottest words in our vocabulary these days are “vaccines” and “masks.”

As schools return to in-classroom education, debates about both are playing out in communities and school board meetings all over Pennsylvania.

Gov. Tom Wolf announced Tuesday that the state Health Department has issued a mask mandate to take effect next Tuesday, a move that has riled some parents and many Republican and a few Democratic legislators. The order requires face coverings indoors in all PreK-12 public and private schools and in licensed child care centers.

Prior to doing this, Wolf tried a collaborative approach by sending a letter to legislative leaders asking that lawmakers return to Harrisburg to pass a masking mandate. This request was dead on arrival, because, as expected, there was no way that the Republican-controlled General Assembly would impose a masking mandate that most of them oppose and which would infuriate their base.

Prior to this request, Wolf had favored a local decision-making approach to the masking question, but he said he changed his mind because of the rapid spread of the delta variant of COVID-19 throughout the state.

Wolf noted that at the time he sent his request just 59 school districts out of 474 that shared health plans with the state required masks. Lehighton and Palmerton are among them, following guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the State Health Department.

The decision, however, provoked a backlash at a recent Lehighton school board meeting from some parents who oppose the mask mandate, and in Palmerton when the board announced its decision in August, there were jeers and a Nazi salute from some audience members.

These masking debates - some of them becoming increasingly heated - are taking place at many other school board meetings across the five-county Times News region. In Bethlehem last week, a woman who angrily criticized the board’s decision to mandate mask-wearing, was escorted from the board room for using profanity.

Some board members report being cursed at and ridiculed in school parking lots after meetings either for their stance on the issue or for wearing masks.

The issues of vaccines and masking have become entangled in politics rather than remaining the province of medicine, science and health experts.

At the present time, no approved vaccine is available for those under 12 years of age. Several companies are working on developing a vaccine for this age group with some optimistic projections indicating that one could be available by the end of 2021.

I find it ironic that up until the state mandate, school board members, most of whom have no medical expertise, were thrust into the position of deciding whether children should be wearing masks and whether those old enough should be vaccinated. A frustrated Panther Valley School Board member summed it up best when he told a friend, “I sure as hell did not sign up for this.”

There are concerns that some parents will openly defy the mask mandate order, which could lead to confrontations and other ugly scenes. The order didn’t come with enforcement, with Wolf saying that it would be up to schools and districts to enforce it.

According to Elena Conis, a medicine and public health historian at Emory University in Atlanta, the vaccine skepticism of today is rooted in the social movements of the postwar era, which prompted a generation of parents and their children to question environmental contaminants, drugs, doctors and authority in general.

She also characterized today’s vaccination hesitancy and skepticism as an “understandable response to late-20th-century trends in childrearing, a steadily growing mandatory vaccination schedule and continually expanding rationales for vaccinating against disease.”

In his fascinating book “The Death of Expertise,” author Tom Nichols concludes that “Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue.”

This may explain how politics has become a major factor in how many Americans view the complicated and explosive subjects of vaccines and mask-wearing.

“To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything,” Nichols wrote.

He refers to it as a new “declaration of independence.” “No longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident,” he said. “We hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable, and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.”

We are seeing in some ways a repeat of what occurred in the 1960s. Health officials thought parents would embrace the new vaccines for childhood diseases such as measles. Some did, especially if it was recommended by their doctor, but many did not.

The rate of infection between lower-class and middle- and upper-class families grew. To close the gap, health professionals tried numerous tactics, just as we are seeing now to promote COVID-19 vaccinations, but none truly worked.

Officials finally turned to coercion by endorsing state policies that made the new vaccines mandatory for children to enroll in school.

It appears as if this is the direction in which we are headed again, but you can be sure that many parents and politicians will fight tooth and nail to prevent this from happening.

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com

The foregoing opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Times News LLC.