It is now September 2022 - 2 1/2 years after the COVID scare began. Surely there is a special place in hell for those grown-ups who would still force schoolchildren to wear masks despite the proven lack of risk to children from the coronavirus.
At this point, masks are not necessary or particularly effective for adults, either. This is why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has backed down on earlier recommendations for masks, even on airplanes. And, of course, masks were probably never helpful for children, whose risk from the virus was always nearly nonexistent.
To be sure, there is something strangely fitting about the Head Start program in half of all U.S. states persisting in forcing children to wear uncomfortable, sweaty, itchy, and medically useless masks over their faces all day. After all, science also tells us that Head Start does not help children, yet it still exists.
But that does not mean the children enrolled in Head Start deserve to live under irrational, unscientific rules. Sadly for them, Head Start is governed by President Joe Biden's Department of Health and Human Services, not the public health bureaucrats at the CDC. The latter took far too long to give up on masking, but at least they finally did it. HHS is still living by a rule issued in November 2021, at the height of the scare over the delta variant of the coronavirus.
For most people, the pandemic crisis ended when the first vaccines were made available. Most received the shot and stopped worrying about COVID. But there were a couple of holdouts - specifically, jurisdictions like New York City, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles - whose irrational tendency toward COVID safetyism lingered on and is dictating policy even now. For example, New York's mask mandate on mass transit is only being lifted this week, and LA actually attempted to begin this school year with a new mask mandate before a public outcry prevented it.
One lesson from the pandemic is that there are trade-offs for everything. Whether a restrictive public health measure will slow the spread of a disease is just one key question among many. When it comes to questions of children attending school in person or wearing masks in September 2022, that was actually one of the easiest for science to answer. Children have always been at minimal risk from COVID. They comprise one population for which masks were probably never helpful at all. At this point, when the coronavirus is almost certain to infect everyone at some point but also causes much milder sickness even in those who show symptoms, there is little point in anyone wearing a mask.
And it's not just that a mask on a child is a scratchy, uncomfortable spit-catching device that is rarely worn properly anyway - a device that makes it harder to breathe and impossible to see the facial expressions of peers. For younger children, masks also make it harder to learn how to speak and read. Also, the inability to see other people's facial expressions may also have as-yet-unknown effects on children.
Biden's HHS secretary, Xavier Becerra, doesn't seem to be doing anything anyway. So we hope he finds the time to order his agency to take a short break from suing nuns and forcing unwilling doctors to perform abortions and instead think about the well-being of children for a change. This Head Start rule needs to be changed immediately.
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Tags: Editorials, Joe Biden, Head Start, Education, Coronavirus, Washington D.C.
Original Author: Washington Examiner
Original Location: Why is Biden still masking children?