Posts tagged as “masks”

Lefties Finally and Belatedly Call for an End to School Masking

Lefties Finally and Belatedly Call for an End to School Masking

By John R Guardiano on January 30, 2022

With the scientific evidence clear and irrefutable, the anguished cries of children and their parents finally are breaking through the blue wall of conformity and compliance.

“Progressive” media organs, left-wing journalists, and Democratic Party partisans are belatedly acknowledging that the school masking regime, which has done so much to undermine the education of our children, needs to end.

The reasons: a belated recognition

that children are at very little risk of serious illness if they contract COVID;

that the science behind masking doesn’t exist or is weak at best; and

that masking can inflict real damage on children, especially disadvantaged children with leaning disabilities and cognitive challenges.

We reviewed a variety of studies—some conducted by the CDC itself, some cited by the CDC as evidence of masking effectiveness in a school setting, and others touted by media to the same end—to try to find evidence that would justify the CDC’s no-end-in-sight mask guidance for the very-low-risk pediatric population, particularly post-vaccination.

We came up empty-handed.

Who said that? Some Trump-loving right-winger who is anti-science? No, that was written by Margery Smelkinson, Leslie Bienen, and Jeanne Noble in The Atlantic, an impeccably left-wing media organ.

Smelkinson is an infectious-disease scientist who works at the National Institutes of Health. Leslie Bienen is a veterinarian and faculty member at the Oregon Health & Science University–Portland State University School of Public Health. Jeanne Noble is an emergency-medicine doctor at University of California San Francisco.

“Recent prospective studies from Greece and Italy,” they write,

found evidence that masking is a barrier to speech recognition, hearing, and communication, and that masks impede children’s ability to decode facial expressions, dampening children’s perceived trustworthiness of faces,

Research has also suggested that hearing-impaired children have difficulty discerning individual sounds; opaque masks, of course, prevent lip-reading.

Some teachers, parents, and speech pathologists have reported that masks can make learning difficult for some of America’s most vulnerable children, including those with cognitive delays, speech and hearing issues, and autism.

Masks may also hinder language and speech development—especially important for students who do not speak English at home. Masks may impede emotion recognition, even in adults, but particularly in children.

Forcing students to wear face masks, writes Vinay Prasad, an epidemiologist at the University of California San Francisco, “isn’t a matter of protecting children, their teachers, or their grandparents. It’s delusional and dangerous cultlike behavior.”

Was that published in American Greatness, the house organ of Trumpian conservatism? No, Prasad wrote that in Tablet, “a daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture.”

“I think it would be naïve to not acknowledge that there are downsides of masks,” said Elissa Perkins, the director of infectious disease management in the emergency department of the Boston Medical Center.

I know some of that data is harder to come by because those outcomes are not as discrete as Covid or not-Covid.

But from speaking with pediatricians, from speaking with learning specialists, and also from speaking with parents of younger children especially, there are significant issues related to language acquisition, pronunciation, things like that.

And there are very clear social and emotional side effects in the older kids.

“That’s why,” writes far-left New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, “I believe that mandatory school masking should end when coronavirus rates return to pre-Omicron levels.”

Whoa! Knock me over with a feather. Who would thunk it?! Michelle Goldberg and the New York Times now acknowledge that masks may pose a danger to children. Miracles really do happen. Lord have mercy!

Not to be outdone, National Public Radio (NPR) now admits:

Numerous scientific papers have established that it can be harder to hear and understand speech and identify facial expressions and emotions when people are wearing masks…

These are critical developmental tasks, particularly for children in the first three years of life.

The United States is an outlier in recommending masks from the age of 2 years old. The World Health Organization does not recommend masks for children under age 5, while the European equivalent of the CDC doesn’t recommend them for children under age 12.

Manfred Spitzer is a psychiatrist and a cognitive neuroscientist in Germany.

He published a scientific review of evidence on how masking could impact children’s development.

Spitzer says the negatives of masking are particularly clear for very young children. He believes that young children’s caregivers should be unmasked as well.

“Kids need to train up their face recognition,” he says, and they need to see full faces to learn to identify emotions as well as to learn language.

“Babies were never designed just to see the upper half of the face and to infer the lower half; even adults have a hard time doing this.”

…Germany doesn’t require masks for children under age 6.

“When speech no longer happens, when communication is interfered with, I think if that happens for a week, that’s OK,” he explains. “But if that happens for half a year, that’s eternity when it comes to brain development, at a very young age.”

He points out that COVID-19 is usually mild for young children, but it’s a critical period for development.

“If you’ve got compelling medical evidence [for masking students],” that’s one thing,” says Virginia State Senator Chap Peterson, a Democrat who represents bright blue Fairfax County in Northern Virginia.

But the evidence to me is showing the exact opposite… School districts need to define an exit strategy for masking… They need to find a way. We need to find a way… The current policy is not best for kids.

“On Monday,” notes National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar,

the Washington Post published an op-ed from three medical experts calling to end mask mandates in schools. The Atlantic joined in on Tuesday. Today, it’s NPR’s turn and @michelleinbklyn in the New York Times.

The dam is breaking.

The only question is when will Dem political leaders in blue cities/ counties/ states follow suit. In Virginia, because [Republican Governor Glenn] Youngkin stuck his neck out on the issue, they’re going to do it so it doesn’t seem like they’re following the GOP’s lead.

True, it would be nice if lefties and “progressives” admitted that conservatives were right all along to be skeptical about the efficacy of masks and the dangers of masking children.

But as Harry Truman once said, “it is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”

Parents and children throughout the United States really don’t care who gets the credit for ending the misguided school masking regime. They just want it to end, and the sooner the better.

Feature photo credit: The Atlantic magazine logo and New York Times’ left-wing columnist Michelle Goldberg, care of The Atlantic Monthly Group and U.C. Berkeley, respectively.

Virginia Parents Fight Ill-Founded School Mask Mandates

Virginia Parents Fight Ill-Founded School Mask Mandates

By John R Guardiano on January 25, 2022

But this time, their governor, newly inaugurated Republican Glenn Youngkin, has their back and is fighting for them.

Brave parents, teachers and schoolchildren in Northern Virginia are waging a valiant struggle for students to attend school unmasked, even as the public schools bureaucracy acts to punish them for their heresy.

This latest skirmish arose because Virginia’s new Republican Governor, Glenn Youngkin, signed an executive order that allows individual parents to decide whether their children will attend school masked or unmasked.

In so doing, Youngkin is keeping faith with the voters who elected him, as parental rights was a major campaign issue in his 2021 race for governor.

Virginia parents, like parents nationwide, had reached their wits end because of schools that would not open, teachers who would not teach, and a curriculum that would not steer clear of far-left political and cultural indoctrination.

Yet, some prominent school districts in Northern Virginia remain obstinate and unmoved. They literally are turning away unmasked students, or isolating them and segregating them from the classroom.

The issue will soon be taken up by the Virginia State Supreme Court. Gov. Youngkin says he is confident that his executive order will be vindicated by the Virginia jurists. Virginia code § 1-240.1, he notes, says “a parent has fundamental right to make decisions concerning the upbringing, education, and care of the parent’s child.”

The problem is that the Virginia state legislature passed a law in 2021 requiring school boards to adhere

to the maximum extent practicable, to any currently applicable mitigation strategies for early childhood care and education programs and elementary and secondary schools to reduce the transmission of COVID-19 that have been provided by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC recommends “universal indoor masking by all students (ages 2 years and older), staff, teachers, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status.”

Of course, the science behind this CDC recommendation is utterly lacking.

Students are not efficient transmitters of the coronavirus and teachers are not at serious risk of contracting COVID from students. “A North Carolina study conducted before vaccines were available,” write Drs. Marty Makary and H. Cody Meissner

found not a single case of student-to-teacher transmission when 90,000 students were in school. The faster-spreading Delta [and Omicron variants have] emerged since—but many teachers, parents and children 12 and over have also been vaccinated.

And masks—especially the cloth masks that most students have been wearing and are still wearing—do little to nothing to stop or slow the spread of COVID.

In fact, when, in 2020, the CDC actually studied the efficacy of masking schoolchildren, it found that, in Georgia, “the lower incidence in schools that required mask use among students was not statistically significant compared with schools where mask use was optional.”

To date, some 862,000 Americans have died with or from COVID. Nearly 75 percent of these deaths have been people 65 years of age or older.

Only 4.2 percent of these deaths have been people 45 years of age or younger. And only a minuscule fraction of one percent, less than 1,000 deaths, have been people 17 years of age or younger.

The idea that schoolchildren need to be masked to protect them and others from COVID simply is not borne out by either the science or the data.

Thus the Northern Virginia school districts that insist on masking schoolchildren are acting in defiance of the science and, arguably, in contravention of state law. They also are acting against the express wishes of most Virginia parents as shown by Youngkin’s election as governor.

For this reasons, school districts ought to allow parents to decide whether their children should be masked, especially while the issue works its way through the judicial system. That is the right, just, and honorable thing to do.

Instead, schools are punishing students for following a lawful gubernatorial executive order. This is wrong and unconscionable, and the school administrators who are doing this ought to be held accountable by their school boards and by the parents whom they are supposed to serve.

Feature photo credit: Parents protest against school mask mandates and remote learning in Trenton, New Jersey, June 3, 2021, courtesy of Jose F. Moreno, in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Mask Diversion

Mask Diversion

By John R Guardiano on January 18, 2022

Mask fetishists are pushing higher-quality respirators and surgical masks to stop or slow COVID, but they don’t have a scientific leg to stand on.

Now that cloths masks have been shown to be useless at stopping the spread of viral respiratory infections, mask fetishists are pushing respirators and surgical masks (N95s and KN95s) to stop COVID. Are they right to do so?

Evidence. Let’s look at the empirical and scientific evidence.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) claims that masks “are effective at reducing transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, when worn consistently and correctly…

“Properly fitted respirators, [including N95s], provide the highest level of protection.” However, it is important, says the CDC, “to check that [your mask] fits snugly over your nose, mouth, and chin,” and therein lies the rub.

Can people—especially young school-age children—reasonably be expected to wear a tightly fitted mask all day when interacting with others?

The undesirability of being masked, especially with a tightly fitted respirator or surgical mask, is obvious. Masks are irritating and they can cause health problems, especially when worn incorrectly and for prolonged periods of time. Masks also inhibit social interaction and communication.

For these reasons, no one enjoys being masked. Which is why there is good reason to doubt that these higher-quality masks would do much to stop or slow the spread of COVID in the general population (as opposed to a tightly contained surgical room).

Michael Osterholm and his team of researchers at the University of Minnesota, for instance, found that, since the beginning of the pandemic roughly a fourth of the population has consistently worn their masks loosely and incorrectly, under their nose, with plenty of room for viral leakage.

Is there any reason to think that people would be more fastidious about how they wear respirators and surgical masks?

Mask Study. The media has trumpeted the one and only randomized controlled trial involving respirators and N95 masks; but, in fact, this study showed only a very modest reduction in the spread of COVID. And it occurred in a poor country, Bangladesh, that bears little resemblance to the United States.

“The study did not find a significant impact of masks on coronavirus spread,” writes U.C. Berkeley Professor Benjamin Recht.

My takeaway is that a complex intervention including an educational program, free masks, encouraged mask wearing, and surveillance in a poor country with low population immunity and no vaccination showed at best a modest reduction in infection

Needless to say, and as this pandemic has shown, the American people are fiercely independent and not easily led or corralled into compliance. We are a vast, diverse, and unruly continental nation.

For many of us, “live free or die” is a way of life. Good luck, then, achieving the same results here as the researchers allegedly achieved in Bangladesh with surgical masks.

And even if universal masking here were as effective as the researchers claim it was in Bangladesh, is it worth the costs and tradeoffs involved?

Unimpressive Results. As Professor Recht observes, “community masking improved an individual’s risk of infection by a factor of only 1.1x… That’s not a lot of risk reduction.” In the MRNA vaccine trials, by contrast, the risk of symptomatic infection was reduced by a factor of 20x.

Moreover, the effect size in the study is “too small to inform policymaking.” Ostensibly because of masking, only 20 fewer people out of more than 340,000 participants were found to be seronegative or free of COVID.

“The corresponding efficacy is 11%, still woefully low.” The study thus lacks “statistical significance,” Recht writes.

The bottom line: there is little reason to believe that even higher-quality respirators and surgical masks (N95s and KN95s) would do much to stop or slow the spread of COVID in the general population.

Real-world settings and everyday social interactions simply are not analogous to a surgical room. And the one randomized controlled trial involving respirators and N95 masks yielded unimpressive results that are unlikely to be replicated in the United States and other freedom-loving countries.

Instead of wasting time on masks, public health authorities should focus on what works: vaccines, social distancing, and therapeutics. Masks are a mass diversion.

Feature photo credit: a registered nurse wears an N95 mask in the acute care unit of Harborview Medical Center, Friday, Jan. 14, 2022, in Seattle, Washington (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson), courtesy of KTLA Los Angeles.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Mask Lies

Lies, Damn Lies, and Mask Lies

By John R Guardiano on January 17, 2022

Public health experts now admit what the empirical and scientific evidence has shown all along: cloth masks don’t work.

Like a bad dream that won’t go away, our public health experts’ unhealthy mask fetish continues, albeit with an important qualification:

Public health experts now acknowledge that cloth masks—which they foisted upon the American people for at least the first 18 months of this pandemic—don’t stop or slow the the spread of viral respiratory infections.

“Cloth masks are little more than facial decorations,” admits CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and visiting professor of health policy and management at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health.

“I wish we’d get rid of the term masking,” adds Michael Osterholm, Director of Infectious Disease, Research and Policy, at the University of Minnesota. “Because, in fact, it implies anything you put in front of your face works…

We know today that many of the face cloth coverings that people wear are not very effective in reducing any of the virus movement in or out—either [that] you’re breathing out or you’re breathing in.

Mr. Osterholm made those comments more than five months ago, Aug. 2, 2021; and Dr. Wen’s comments were recorded by CNN three weeks ago.

CDC. Yet, only three days ago (Fri., Jan. 14, 2022), did the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) finally acknowledge (sort of) this empirical, scientific reality.

I say sort of because the CDC still refuses to acknowledge that the efficacy of cloth masks has not been demonstrated in any real-world population setting (as opposed to an artificial laboratory setting). “Masking,” asserts the CDC

is a critical public health tool for preventing spread of COVID-19, and it is important to remember that any mask is better than no mask.

Historical Evidence. This is simply not true, as even mask fetishists Mr. Osterholm and Dr. Wen readily acknowledge. And while cloth masks are even less effective against the more contagious and fast-spreading Omicron variant, their utility against any respiratory virus, COVID included, is sorely lacking.

“More than a century after the 1918 influenza pandemic,” write researchers from the Cato Institute,

examination of the efficacy of masks has produced a large volume of mostly low- to moderate-quality evidence that has largely failed to demonstrate their value in most settings.

“COVID is so dangerous,” notes Cato’s Thomas A. Firey, “that masking doesn’t provide much benefit—and cotton masks seem to provide no benefit at all.”

In short, the evidence is clear, consistent, and definitive: cloth masks don’t work. They don’t stop or slow the spread of viral respiratory infections. Let’s end the charade and give up the fetish—and let’s focus, instead, on things that really do work: vaccines, social distancing, and therapeutics.

Feature photo credit: Screen shots of Dr. Leana Wen and Michael Osterholm from the PBS News Hour and CSPAN, respectively.

Follow the Science and Burn Your Mask

Follow the Science and Burn Your Mask

By John R Guardiano on June 6, 2021

After more than a year of mask mandates and mask fetishization, the results of Uncle Sam’s latest scientific experiment are in. Masks failed.

Now that mask mandates have been lifted just about everywhere in the United States save for airlines, trains, buses, and other forms of public transportation, it’s a good time to revisit whether masks ever made much sense, did any good, or caused any harm.

The rationale for masks was always weak to begin with. Masks failed to stop the spread of the influenza virus during the 1918 pandemic and they fared no better in the subsequent decades. The New York Times reports that, according two Nancy Leung, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong:

There has been no clear evidence from randomized controlled trials—the gold standard in scientific research—that masking reduced transmission of influenza viruses in a community.

The evidence for the efficacy of masks to stop or slow the spread of the coronavirus is also sorely lacking.

“There are several case studies of Covid-19 outbreaks in confined spaces despite good mask adherence, reports Connor Harris in the City Journal. Marine Corps recruits in 2020, for instance, suffered an outbreak of COIVD despite wearing cloth masks almost constantly.

Michigan v. Texas. When Texas rescinded its mask mandate March 10, 2021, COVID cases fell by 17 percent two weeks later. In Michigan, meanwhile, where masks continued to be required, COVID cases spiked by 133 percent during that same two-week period, reports Philip Klein.

Michigan did not (mostly) lift its mask requirement until June 1—almost three months later than Texas. Yet, comparative data does not show that Michigan benefited as a result.

Indeed, the incidence of COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths either roughly corresponds with the difference in population between these two states or is clearly in Texas’s favor.

Texas’ population is about three times that of Michigan, and the state has had 2.9 times as many COVID cases and 2.5 times as many COVID deaths. As of June 5, Texas is averaging about twice as many COVID hospitalizations and 3.1 times as many COVID cases in the preceding two-week period.

As Michael Betrus reports at Rational Ground:

California issued a statewide mask mandate in June 2020. Rhode Island issued its mandate back in May 2020, as did neighboring Connecticut in April 2020. What else do these states have in common?

They were among leaders in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths long after implementing their mandates. Were they infected by nearby states? New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Oregon, and many counties in Nevada and Arizona also had mask mandates.

Florida did not have a statewide mask mandate. Nor did Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming, Iowa, Missouri, or Oklahoma. Other states like North Dakota, Arizona, and Indiana issued short-term mask mandates.

These states fared no worse and in most cases fared far better than states with mask mandates. Why would this be, if face masks work?

“It would be an overstatement to say that cloth and surgical masks are unambiguously ineffective or harmful,” Harris writes. “But neither is there a firm case that they provide any meaningful benefit.”

The harmful effects of masks are typically ignored or downplayed; but these harmful effects are real and should give us serious pause when, during the next pandemic, government officials try to enforce new mask mandates—especially on children, who are less able to cope with mask-induced problems.

Face rashes, headaches, bacterial infections, dental problems (cavities and gingivitis), and fiber inhalation are all problems, Harris notes, associated with masks during this pandemic.

“Potential harms to children,” he adds, “deserve special mention.

Two Italian professors of plastic surgery, for instance, have hypothesized that the pressure of elastic ear straps may give children permanently protruding ears.

Some child development researchers also worr y that widespread mask-wearing may hamper children’s linguistic and emotional development.

There may even be ways by which masks might worsen Covid-19 itself. The basic reason is simple: germs caught by a mask do not simply disappear.

The evidence for these is spotty or speculative but concerning enough to merit attention. In any case, the evidence justifying mask mandates is often equally speculative.

Children. One thing that is not speculative is the educational and social damage that masks inflict on children. Non-verbal communication involving facial expressions—especially in the classroom—is one of the primary ways that teachers communicate with their students.

Social interaction between and among students, likewise, is integral to a child’s development. Yet, masks induce in children social isolation.

They signal, clearly, that social interaction is risky because it can result in contraction of the coronavirus. But the data has shown all along that children are at extraordinarily low risk of getting COVID and at even less risk of suffering serious ailments even if they do.

In short, if we are, indeed, to “follow the science,” then we must abandon the fetishization of masks. They never made much sense to begin with; they demonstrably did not do any good; and they actually inflicted serious harm on people, especially children. Good riddance.

Feature photo credit: Americans, free at last of the onerous and counterproductive mask mandate, celebrate their newfound freedom and independence, courtesy of MedPage Today.