Oh right because you are too scared to wear a tiny piece of cloth ....
UK: We Are Changing Our School Masking Guidance, and Recommending...Even Fewer Masks
Regular readers are
already aware that multiple foreign governments are not requiring masking in classrooms, based on their data and experience. We recently quoted a New York Magazine deep dive into the evidence on this issue, which has become controversial and political in the United States. Not so much elsewhere: "Many of America’s peer nations around the world — including the U.K., Ireland, all of Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy — have exempted kids, with varying age cutoffs, from wearing masks in classrooms,"
the piece reported, alongside this key piece of information: "Conspicuously, there’s no evidence of more outbreaks in schools in those countries relative to schools in the U.S., where the solid majority of kids wore masks for an entire academic year." As we've
also pointed out, the European Union's CDC recommends no masking in schools for kids under the age of 12. Having weathered a difficult Delta variant surge, the UK government recently
shifted its guidance on this subject – further
away from in-school masking:
The 'Science' Behind School Masking Suffers Another Blow
The masking data he was falsely applying to children in schools is actually unsupported by any robust studies. We'll revisit that in a moment, but our exchange elicited a number of super-sciencey '
rebuttals' like this:
The Science of Masking Kids at School Remains Uncertain
After the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics issued their student-mask guidance last month, I contacted both organizations asking for the evidence or underlying data upon which they had based their recommendations. The AAP did not respond to multiple requests. The CDC press office replied that since children under 12 cannot be vaccinated, the agency “recommends schools do universal masking” and included links to unrelated materials on vaccines and a recent outbreak among adults. Over the course of several weeks, I also corresponded with many experts — epidemiologists, infectious-disease specialists, an immunologist, pediatricians, and a physician publicly active in matters relating to COVID — asking for the best evidence they were aware of that mask requirements on students were effective. Nobody was able to find a data set as robust as the Georgia results — that is, a large cohort study directly looking at the effects of a mask requirement. (The closest is a
study published in
Science, based on a Facebook survey, that was suggestive but
not conclusive of a marginal benefit of student masking.One doctor, who is on TV regularly and has around 100,000 Twitter followers, sent me two studies where masks were required of all students so there was no way to determine the effect; the authors of one of the studies explicitly noted, “we were not able to examine the impact of universal masking owing to nearly 100 percent adoption of this intervention,” and authors of the other study wrote, “it was not possible to determine the specific roles that mask-wearing played in the low rate of disease spread.” )
“A year ago, I said, ‘Masks are not the end of the world; why not just wear a mask?’” Elissa Schechter-Perkins, the director of Emergency Medicine Infectious Disease Management at Boston Medical Center, told me. “But the world has changed, there are real downsides to masking children for this long, with no known end date, and without any clear upside.” She continued, “I’m not aware of any studies that show conclusively that kids wearing masks in schools has any effect on their own morbidity or mortality or on the hospitalization or death rate in the community around them.”
Schechter-Perkins is just one of a number of top experts calling for this type of discussion — and raising questions about the CDC’s recent recommendations and what has become accepted conventional knowledge. “We lack credible evidence for benefits of masking kids aged 2 to 5, despite what the American Academy of Pediatrics says,” Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School,
wrote recently. While there are models, and simulations on mannequins with masks, “mechanistic studies are incapable of anticipating and tallying the effects that emerge when real people are asked to do real things in the real world,” Vinay Prasad of UCSF wrote in a
critique of the CDC’s child masking recommendation. “The CDC cannot ‘follow the science’ because there is no relevant science.”
That guy they arrested for his Lego set...saved the country they did.
www.justice.gov