Eric Adams may still be an improvement over Bill de Blasio, but … he seems insistent on proving what a low bar that truly is. New York City’s new mayor wanted to pander to the LGBTQIA+ crowd by demagoguing Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law. Characterizing it as a “don’t say gay” bill, Adams held a press conference heralding the Big Apple as “the city where you can say whatever you want.”

That’s news to one young mother and city employee, who showed up to ask why Adams reneged on a pledge to end mask mandates for little kids. Turns out that Adams found some words he didn’t like — and retaliated:

Daniela Jampel, who served as an assistant corporation counsel, learned she was canned less than an hour after she confronted a caught-off-guard and apparently annoyed Adams over when he would “unmask our toddlers.”

Jampel had publicly challenged the mayor at an unrelated event on LGBTQ issues — as Adams stood in front of a podium banner that read, “Come to the city where you can say whatever you want.’’

“Three weeks ago, you told parents to trust you that you would unmask our toddlers,” Jampel told the mayor.

“You stood right here, and you said that the masks would come off April 4. That has not happened.”

Masking toddlers is an idiotic policy on its own even without this nonsense. Children do not have substantial risk for acute COVID-19 and are not vectors for its transmission. The CDC’s own data shows that even when counting correlated cases, admissions, and deaths rather than limiting that to causative instances, minors didn’t even show up in the data until Omicron, and that was entirely correlative. Children under five don’t tolerate masking well and likely are completely ineffective at it anyway.

And yet, here we are. Our friend Karol Markowicz blasted Adams over this policy on Sunday:

Announcing the continuation of masking toddlers, something no other Western country did at any point in the pandemic, Vasan said, “We want to keep an eye on this latest uptick to ensure that our youngest New Yorkers remain safe, as we see an increase in cases due to the more infectious BA.2 subvariant. As we know in the past, cases and hospitalizations have risen in this vulnerable age group, in line with wider community spread, usually lagging by a couple of weeks.”

This is, simply, a lie. New York City’s “alert level” is green, “low.” COVID hospitalizations for kids under 18 are 0.5 per 100,000 and have been for months.

Meanwhile, the over-70 set is at 4.7 per 100,000, and they can traipse around the city maskless licking lampposts and snogging strangers. If it sounds like it doesn’t make sense, that’s because it doesn’t and never has.

The commissioner absolutely knows it’s a lie. Two days earlier, he tweeted a chart showing kids under 5 with the city’s lowest case rates.

The worst part is that city attorneys responded to a lawsuit challenging the toddler mask mandate by arguing that as of April 4, “the petitioners’ children will no longer be required to wear masks in child-care settings,” so there was no danger of “immediate and irreparable injury, loss or damages.” Liars.

Now Adams has managed to complete a trifecta of stupidity with his toddler-masking mandate. Not only did Adams announce that he would continue to defend the mandate in court, he fired a city attorney for speaking out about it at a nonsense stunt that deliberately lied about Florida’s new law in order to paint mandate-crazy NYC as a bastion of freedom. How could Adams possibly have embarrassed himself more?

Er … did I mention that it was a lawyer that Adams’ administration fired? And who maybe was a whistleblower to boot?

“We hold all of our employees to the highest professional standards. In public statements, Ms. Jampel has made troubling claims about her work for the city Law Department. Based on those statements, the decision had been made to terminate her prior to today,” the spokesman said.

“Today’s events, however, which include her decision to lie to City Hall staff and state she was a journalist at a press conference, demonstrate a disturbing lack of judgment and integrity. As of today, she is no longer an employee of the Law Department.”

Jampel told The Post in a statement, “I am retaining counsel and will not litigate in the press.”

What “troubling claims” were those? The New York Post’s story only covers Jampel’s op-ed commentary from last year about school closures and mask mandates, and a rally two weeks ago in which the Post quoted her criticism of Adams for “not following the science.” Two months ago, Jampel was in good enough standing at work to get maternity leave, so … were they planning on firing a mother who took family leave in the city that just got done sneering at Florida for not being progressive enough?  Because that will look just peachy in court when Jampel finds a fellow lawyer to set up the college fund for her children at the expense of New York City taxpayers.

Great job, Mayor Adams. Usually it takes a Biden or a Harris to generate this kind of idiotic backfire.

Addendum: I almost forgot to include this comment from Christina Pushaw, Ron DeSantis’ comms director:

Today, @NYCMayor held a press conference to beg Floridians to move to NYC, after half the city moved to Florida to escape covidian dictatorship. At the presser, a city employee (& mom) asked the mayor why NYC is still masking toddlers. She was promptly fired. Can’t make this up.

— Christina Pushaw 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) April 5, 2022

Truth is stranger than fiction …