Like Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day in Times Square or Widener’s Tank Man for generations previous, Stacey Abrams smiling maskless before a group of masked five-year-olds may be the defining image of the pandemic era in the United States.

Last week, Abrams was at Glennwood Elementary School to celebrate Black History Month. After reading aloud from Stacey’s Extraordinary Words (her “debut picture book“) Abrams stepped away from the lectern and sat crosslegged in front of a crowd of masked children for a photo-op.

When people noticed the photo, first tweeted by the Glennwood principal and subsequently retweeted by Abrams, Abrams deleted the tweet and the principal deleted her account. But people took screenshots and observed the obvious—of all the people gathered in that classroom, not one was at greater visible risk from the coronavirus than the would-be governor of Georgia.

Rather than apologize, the Abrams campaign released a series of statements denouncing its critics as “shameful” and accusing them of using “a Black History Month reading event for Georgia children as the impetus for a false political attack.”

The “attack” was not “false,” and eventually Abrams went on CNN to apologize.

“Protocols matter. Protecting our kids is the most important thing, and anything that can be perceived as undermining that is a mistake, and I apologize,” she said after a series of equivocations. Asked if she still supported mask mandates in schools, she said she did, adding that Georgia is “not in a place” to drop its mandates because the state has “one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country.”

Setting aside the shamelessness of Abrams’s response, a state’s relative vaccination rate has nothing to do with the question of whether children in that state should be required to wear masks in school. The coronavirus poses virtually no risk to the overwhelming majority of children. Every teacher—every adult, for that matter— in the state of Georgia who wants to get the vaccine has had the opportunity to do so. And the vaccines reduce an individual’s likelihood of hospitalization and death but do not meaningfully prevent transmission. Cloth masks offer little protection against the virus.  The costs of masking children—particularly young children and those with disabilities—is enormous. Abrams should have apologized for her hypocrisy, but her greater sin is to persist in defending an indefensible policy.