Masking School Children is Ineffective, Unnecessary, and Harmful

Face masks are not only ineffective, they are more dangerous than parents are being told. Scientific study after scientific study over the course of many years have concluded that wearing face masks for extended periods of time puts the wearer, especially children, in imminent risk of physical and psychological harms.

Mandatory masks in school are a ‘major threat’ to children’s development, doctors warn

Wednesday, 09 September 2020

The face mask requirement at school is bad for children’s general well-being and should be abolished, 70 doctors wrote in an open letter to Flemish Education Minister Ben Weyts.

The doctors want [Flemish Education Minister] Weyts to immediately reverse his approach: no face mask requirement at school, only protect the at-risk group and only advise people with a possible risk profile to consult their doctor.

“In recent months, the general well-being of children and young people has come under severe pressure,” the letter’s authors said. “We see in our practices an increasing number of children and young people with complaints due to the rules of conduct that have been imposed on them.”

The doctors mentioned anxiety and sleep problems as well as behavioural disorders and germaphobia, which is a pathological fear of germs. They are also seeing an increase in domestic violence, isolation and deprivation.

“Mandatory face masks in schools are a major threat to their development. It ignores the essential needs of the growing child. The well-being of children and young people is highly dependent on emotional attachment to others,” they wrote.

According to them, “the face mask requirement makes school a threatening and unsafe environment, where emotional closeness becomes difficult.”

Moreover, “there is no large-scale evidence that wearing face masks in a non-professional environment has any positive effect on the spread of viruses, let alone on general health. Nor is there any legal basis for implementing this requirement.”

“Meanwhile, it is clear that healthy children living through Covid-19 heal without complications as standard and that they subsequently contribute to the protection of their fellow human beings by increasing group immunity”.

“The only sensible measure to prevent serious illness and mortality caused by Covid-19 is to isolate individual teachers and individual children at increased risk,” they said.

“This risk assessment is not the task of the Ministry of Education,” the doctors underlined, “but the task of the treating physicians in consultation with their patients.”

– From The Brussels Times

Forcing Children to Wear Face Masks is Unnecessary

Forcing children to wear face masks in school is ineffective, harmful, and unnecessary. The risk of CoVID-19 in children is so low that any imagined benefits cannot possibly outweigh the risks. Based on CDC data, the risk of children between the ages of zero and 19 years of age dying from CoVID-19 is an incredibly low risk of 0.00195%. This rate is much lower than the risk of children dying from influenza.

In fact, there is a large and growing body of physicians, pediatricians, scientists, epidemiologists, and researchers around the world that are speaking out against the anti-scientific public health recommendations that have been forced upon the public and our children.[R] Those of us that have read the science have concluded that it is senseless and dangerous to force children to wear face masks in school:

• See e.g., Michelle Science MD, MSc, FRCPC, et. al., COVID-19: Guidance for School Reopening, Division of Infectious Diseases, The Hospital for Sick Children (“Sick Kids”), University of Toronto, Canada. https://www.sickkids.ca/PDFs/About-SickKids/81407-COVID19-Recommendations-for-School Reopening-SickKids.pdf

  • The use of [Non-Medical Masks (“NMMs”)] in the school setting should be driven by local epidemiology with age-specific considerations.
  • When transmission in the community is low, the use of NMMs throughout the entire school day should not be mandatory for elementary, middle or high school students returning to school.
  • Safe masking practices (e.g. proper wearing/storage/removal) should be reinforced with educational materials provided to parents, students and teachers.
  • Given the current epidemiology, the use of NMMs is not recommended for elementary school students.

• A Covid-19 cross-country study by the University of East Anglia in England found that a mask requirement was of no benefit and could even increase the risk of infection.

  • Hunter, et al., Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID- 9 in Europe: a quasi-experimental study, May 6, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.01.20088260
  • “We found that closure of education facilities, prohibiting mass gatherings and closure of some non-essential businesses were associated with reduced incidence whereas stay at home orders, closure of all non-businesses and requiring the wearing of face masks or coverings in public was not associated with any independent additional impact.”

Forcing Children to Wear Face Masks for Long Periods Risks Causing Them Physical Injuries.

The topic of the physical harms caused by masks was covered previously, but it is worth repeating a few of the key points:

Wearing a mask for more than a few minutes causes a significant reduction in a person’s blood oxygen level.

• See A. Beder, et al., Preliminary report on surgical mask induced deoxygenation during major surgery, Neurocirugía (2008). http://scielo.isciii.es/pdf/neuro/v19n2/3.pdf
• Transcranial Ultrasound Doppler (TCUD) studies on masked and unmasked individuals demonstrate the changes in blood flow in the brain the result from the arterial CO2 elevation that occurs within seconds of donning a mask.

  This video demonstrates the use of TCUD and heart rate variability to measure the adverse effects of masking a healthy nine year old child: https://bit.ly/2GGQWiZ

Wearing masks for extended periods increased incidences of headaches and negatively affected work performance.

• See Jonathan J.Y. Ong, et al., Headaches Associated With Personal Protective Equipment – A Cross‐Sectional Study Among Frontline Healthcare Workers During COVID‐19, Headache, the Journal of Head and Face Pain (May 2020). https://headachejournal.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/head.13811

Most children wear cloth masks.

• See Brittany Dionne, How hard is it to find a medical grade face mask?, WBRC News, April 18, 2020. https://www.wbrc.com/2020/04/18/how-hard-is-it-find-medical-grade-face-mask/

But wearing a cloth mask may increase the risk of contracting Covid-19 and other respiratory infections.

• See MacIntyre CR, Seale H, Dung TC, et al., A cluster randomised trial of cloth masks compared with medical masks in healthcare workers, BMJ Open 2015; 5: e006577, US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2014-006577, April 22, 2015. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4420971/pdf/bmjopen-2014-006577.pdf

  • “This study is the first [Randomly Controlled Trial] of cloth masks, and the results caution against the use of cloth masks.
  • This is an important finding to inform occupational health and safety. Moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection.”

Forcing Children to Wear Face Masks for Long Periods Risks Causing Them Mental and Psychological Injuries

Children are at risk for psychological trauma in multiple ways by being forced to wear face masks all day long at school. Doctors from around the country warn of the dangers to children of wearing face masks all day.

• See e.g., Jeffrey I. Barke, M.D., Open the schools without politics, American Thinker, June 10, 2020. https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/open_the_schools_without_politics.html

Mandatory face coverings on children is very harmful to the child: learning is inhibited; critical interactions among students and between student and teacher are fractured; and the face covering is counterproductive, as kids will naturally touch their faces, thereby contaminating their covering. This new normal that many are advocating may well lead to a spike in childhood behavior problems such as learning disabilities, anxiety disorders, and depression, to name a few.

• See also Kathleen M. Pike, PhD, Why a Mask is Not Just a Mask, Global Mental Health Programs, Columbia University, April 17, 2020. https://www.cugmhp.org/five-on-friday/why-a-mask-is-not-just-a-mask

Many young children burst into tears or recoil when someone wearing a mask approaches. It’s so common that some elementary schools prohibit masks at the school Halloween parade. One reason for this is that the development of facial recognition is relatively weak in young children. According to University of Toronto psychologist, Dr. Kang Lee, it is not until kids are about 14 years old that they reach adult skill levels in recognizing faces. Before then, kids tend to see individual facial features, rather than recognizing the person as a whole. By putting on masks, we take away information that makes it especially difficult for children to recognize others and read emotional signals, which is unsettling and disconcerting. These issues may be especially true for children with autism spectrum disorder, including Asperger’s syndrome, who tend to have particular difficulties reading non-verbal cues.

Dr. Alice Kuo, President of the Southern California chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement criticizing Los Angeles County school reopening guidelines that require children wear masks as “not realistic or even developmentally appropriate for children.” She explained that, “wearing masks throughout the day can hinder language and socio-emotional development, particularly for younger children.”

• Local Pediatricians Urge Collaborative Decision-Making About Reopening Schools, Southern California chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, June 2, 2020. http://aapca2.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/AAP-CA2-press-release-on-schools-re-opening 6-2-20-Rev.pdf

Some of the serious psychological harms to children caused by extended mask wearing are tied to lack of facial and emotional recognition.

• See Christiane Bormann-Kischkel, Face Recognition in Children, Eur Arch Psychiatr Neurol Sci (1986) 236: 17-20. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00641052

The use of salient visual speech cues is hidden by masks making learning difficult for young children.

• Kaylah Lalondea and Rachael Frush Holta, Preschoolers Benefit From Visually Salient Speech Cues, Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, Vol. 58, 135–150, February 2015. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4712850/pdf/JSLHR-58-135.pdf
• see also Martin Wegrzyn , et al., Mapping the emotional face. How individual face parts contribute to successful emotion recognition, PLoS ONE 12(5): e0177239, May 11, 2017. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0177239
• Lawrence Brancazio et al., Use of visual information in speech perception: Evidence for a visual rate effect both with and without a McGurk effect, Perception & Psychophysics 2005, 67 (5), 759-769. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16334050/
• Mustapha Skhiri, Visual Cues in Speech Perception, Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, GSLT, LiTH 20001/3/02. http://www.speech.kth.se/~rolf/gslt_papers/MustaphaSkiri.pdf

Voices of teachers and other students muffled through face masks makes learning more difficult, especially for any child with a diagnosed or undiagnosed hearing impairment.

• See Amanda B. Silberer, PhD, et al., Importance of High Frequency Audibility on Speech Recognition With and Without Visual Cues in Listeners with Normal Hearing, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders The University of Iowa, March 2014. https://haar.lab.uiowa.edu/sites/haar.lab.uiowa.edu/files/wysiwyg_uploads/silberer_bentler_wu_aas _2014.pdf

The Center for Disease Control (“CDC”) has made clear that “Schools are an important part of the infrastructure of communities and play a critical role in supporting the whole child, not just their academic achievement.”

• See Preparing K-12 School Administrators for a Safe Return to School in Fall 2020. Guidance from the CDC to school Districts. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/schools-childcare/prepare-safe return.html
• Nowhere in the guidance provided to local schools by the CDC is any information about compelling students to wear face masks. In fact, the CDC acknowledges that “[m]ore research and evaluation is needed on the implementation of mitigation strategies (e.g., social distancing, masks, hand hygiene, and use of cohorting) used in schools to determine which strategies are the most effective.” Id. at 5.

The lack of any such recommendation is understandable given that the great weight of scientific evidence shows unmistakably that wearing face masks for extended periods is harmful to people’s health, safety and emotional well-being, especially to young children.