Last week, Gov. Phil Murphy was among one of just a few politicians who had the backs of essential workers and communities of color, opting to not to go along with the CDC’s controversial guidance to drop the indoor mask mandate for people who have been vaccinated.

Next week, that’s apparently going to change and not because the concerns the Governor expressed last week about the potential impact on essential workers and the unvaccinated will be any less valid.

According to multiple press reports, Murphy is expected to announce tomorrow that he will fall in line with the general consensus and lift the indoor mask mandate by Friday May 28. This will be just before the make-or-break Memorial Day holiday for New Jersey’s shore communities, where Trump, even in exile, still enjoys considerable support and anti-vax and anti-mask sentiments shape the politics.

Respected epidemiologists like Dr. Celine Gounder, who served on President Biden’s COVID transition taskforce, had praised Murphy’s initial stand.

She warned that slightly more than on one in four Black Americans were vaccinated with the rate for Hispanics just a few percentage points higher. She warned that the CDC would have better advised to wait for the vaccination rate in communities of color hit the 50 percent mark before rolling back the mask and social distancing requirements.

“It is the duty of public health not to just look out for the individual, but the population and specifically the most vulnerable among us,” Dr. Gounder said at press briefing held after the CDC rollback.

Murphy’s initial stance also earned his props from frontline health care unions like the Health Professionals Allied Employees AFT/AFL-CIO, the state’s largest healthcare union.

“We are writing to applaud your announcement that NJ will maintain an indoor masking mandate despite the new CDC guidance that fully vaccinated people could go without face coverings and social distancing,” wrote the leadership of the Health Professionals Allied Employees, the state’s largest healthcare union. “As representatives of the healthcare community, we support your choosing caution, as the CDC prematurely recommended that our nation return to normal. “

He also garnered words of support from the national office of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) which represents 1.3 million essential food and retail workers including 52,000 in New Jersey.

The UFCW blasted the CDC’s new guidance observing correctly it would force frontline retail workers to play “vaccination police” to sort out which customers would have to continue to wear their masks.

“New Jersey frontline grocery workers have put their lives on the line daily to make sure families have the food they need during the pandemic,” wrote International UFCW President Marc Perrone. “Governor Murphy is showing the leadership New Jersey workers and families need by putting public health and safety first and keeping the state’s mask mandate in place.”

UFCW confirmed “that COVID-19 continues to threaten essential food workers nationwide. Since March 1, UFCW reports a nearly 35 percent increase in grocery worker deaths and a nearly 30 percent increase in grocery workers infected or exposed following supermarket outbreaks at Whole Foods, Costco, Trader Joe’s and other chains across the country.”

Of course, the way we have learned about Murphy’s course correction was through “a government source who was briefed on the decision said Friday,” reported NorthJersey.com.

If you have ever wondered how politicians can manage to appear to be on every side of even the most controversial questions, this latest Murphy mask morphing offers a great case study. You collect all of the props for a ‘principled stand’—take some heat— and then launch a leak without fingerprints that you are tacking back toward where your detractors are on the issue.

Presto, morpho, you’re everywhere and nowhere.

Hopefully, in Murphy’s reset, he can highlight New Jersey’s significant racial disparities that persist even now over a year into the pandemic that’s killed 26,000 and infected over a million residents.

According to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation, it is evident in all 21 of our counties with “the percentage of Black residents who have received the vaccine at 41 percent lower than the percent of that county’s population who is white,” reported NJ Advance Media.

“Similarly, for Hispanic and Latinx residents in every New Jersey county, the percentage of vaccine recipients is at least 45 percent lower than the Hispanic/Latinx population of the county,” according to the news outlet.

Meanwhile, in the world outside the New Jersey shore Memorial Day bubble, in places like Japan, India and Brazil, the pandemic continues to rage.