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Wirepoints

CDC squelched its own study showing masks ineffective for kids in schools. Answers needed. – Wirepoints Quickpoint

August 23, 202121 Link HERE,

Friday’s column in New York Magazine is a must-read for those following the controversy over masks in K-12 schools.

In May, as the column says, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a large-scale study of COVID transmission in American schools. It concluded that masking then-unvaccinated teachers and improving ventilation with more fresh air were associated with a lower incidence of the virus in schools. “The fact that they seem to work is reassuring but not surprising,” as the column says.

But it’s what the study found that the CDC didn’t tell us that’s important. The CDC’s published summary of the study did not include its findings that certain other common mitigation measures in American schools don’t work. Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit.

“In other words, these measures could not be said to be effective,” as the New York Magazine column says.

Finding that masks on school kids don’t work should come as no surprise because that’s “not exactly controversial,” says the column, for reasons it explained:

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. 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 and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. These countries, along with the World Health Organization, whose child-masking guidance differs substantially from the CDC’s recommendations, have explicitly recognized that the decision to mask students carries with it potential academic and social harms for children and may lack a clear benefit.

Scientists the author spoke with believe that omitting the null effects of a student masking requirement amounted to “file drawering” — sticking what you don’t like in a drawer and forgetting about it.

The author challenged the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics to put up their evidence that masks on school kids work since they both recommend it. Both struck out. The CDC provided an evasive answer and the AAP didn’t respond at all.

What evidence could other scientists point to supporting the recommendation of masks in schools?

Nobody the author talked to was able to find a data set as robust as the CDC results, “that is, a large cohort study directly looking at the effects of a mask requirement.” It was indeed a major study, “both ambitious and groundbreaking,” says the column. It covered more than 90,000 elementary-school students in 169 Georgia schools and was, according to the CDC, the first of its kind to compare COVID-19 incidence in schools with certain mitigation measures in place to other schools without those measures.

But CDC deep-sixed the key conclusions. Read the whole New York Magazine column.

The CDC obviously has some explaining to do, but so do officials in states like Illinois that blindly follow CDC guidance. Maybe reporters here will start asking: “What’s your ‘science’ behind masking kids in schools, and please don’t point to CDC guidance?”

COVID remains a deadly risk for certain groups, primarily the elderly and the obese, and case counts are rising. Is it too much to ask whether measures being taken actually work? America is tired of being lied to.

-Mark Glennon

https://wirepoints.org/cdc-squelched-its-own-study-showing-masks-ineffective-for-kids-in-schools-answers-needed-wirepoints-quickpoint/

Commentary: Making pre-school Children wear masks is bad public Health.

ResearchHere:

Making pre school children wear masks is bad public health

Dr Robert C Hughes1, Dr Sunil S Bhopal1,2, Prof Mark Tomlinson 3,4

1 Department of Population Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

2 Faculty of Medical Sciences,

University of Newcastle

3 Department of Global Health, Stellenbosch University

4 School of Nursing and Midwifery, Queens University Belfast

Children are not small adults. This is a critical point that many pediatricians and other child health professionals get bored of saying, yet it does seem to need repeating.

While children have the lowest risk from COVID 19 directly, they risk suffering the indirect impacts of policy decisions, many of which appear to have been made with next to no explicit consideration of their interests. Public health interventions should not only be about infectious disease control, they should consider a broad set of outcomes. In addition, they ought to consider vulnerability, including that in early childhood a time when young children’s brains are developing rapidly and are most susceptible to adversity. We believe that mandating masking of preschool children is not in line with public health principles, and needs to be urgently reconsidered.

Last week, President Biden’s Chief Medical Adviser Dr Fauci promoted the new US CDC Childcare Guidance, which states that “Masks should be worn indoors by all individuals(ages 2 and older) who are not fully vaccinated.

(1)We feel that the CDC and Dr Fauci have, by focusing exclusively on SARS CoV 2 transmission, got this wrong, and that this guidance is not good public health when the limited potential benefits of this policy are considered alongside the potential harms.

The importance of early childhood for the rest of a person’s life is now well understood; what

happens in those early moments really matters, and changing the beginning has the potential to change the whole story including learning, earning and happiness

(2)In addition, the centrality of responsive caregiving and interaction such as that between peers and with caregivers in the home and childcare settings is increasingly well appreciated, affecting language and social emotional development and IQ

(3)This interaction and engagement is much more than an optional ‘nice to have’ that can bedeferred for a few years whilst the pandemic is controlled; the window of ensuring optimal early childhood development is short

(4)During this period moment by moment engagement, caregiver responsiveness, and learning of social cues (including by reading the faces of caregivers and others) are crucial for early socio-emotional development, for

learning the ‘give and take’ of peer interaction and crucially for developing a ‘theory of mind’

(5) It would be considered grossly unethical to attempt to assess the impact of covering the faces of young children and their caregivers on early childhood development.

The potential for harm here is clear, especially when you consider the long hours that many children spend in childcare settings

(6)These risks to early childhood development are especially concerning when balanced against the potential benefits that mandating young children to wear masks might plausibly bring (even before considering likely levels of ‘compliance’ with mask wearing amongst toddlers). There are three potential benefits here that seem worthy of consideration; reduced risk of Covid19 to the child and their peers, reduced risks to their caregivers, and wider benefits for SARSCoV epidemic control.

Considering the first of these, it is increasingly clear that SARSCoV2 thankfully represents an extremely low mortality risk to children

(7)In addition, current experimental estimates of the risks of prolonged symptoms also suggest that these are least common amongst young children

(8)and likely similar to risks they face from other viruses.

Regarding the risk that unmasked toddlers represent to adults caring for them, in the US and other high income countries, childcare staff have now been, or are being, offered highly

effective vaccines which significantly reduce their risk of staff acquiring SARSCoV2, especially from young pauci symptomatic or asymptomatic young children.

Finally, while the wellbeing of the young children and their caregivers who are the subject of this policy ought to be central to decision making, it is worth noting that the contribution of preschool settings to wider epidemic dynamics appears to be limited and less than that of secondary schools or universities.

(9)This may be due to younger children having mostly asymptomatic infection, with associated lower secondary attack rates and onward transmission.As the consensus builds that SARS CoV2 will become an endemic pathogen it is crucial that we focus our effort on interventions that are as harm free and benefit rich as possible.

This may well include mask wearing amongst healthy adults becoming a collective cultural activity where it makes sense (for example in crowded places, especially indoors and where ventilation is poor). But we do not feel that extension of this intervention to preschool children is to be advised, let alone mandated. It is noteworthy that the World Health Organization explicitly advises against masking young children under the age of five.

(10)In summary, the benefits of masking preschool children are unclear but are probably too small to make a major difference to individuals risks from SARS CoV2 or epidemic control(even before considering variable likely compliance amongst toddlers). In contrast, theharms of this policy are likely to be damaging, potentially considerably so. Given this, andthe influence that the CDC and Dr Fauci have both in the US and globally, we believe an urgent reconsideration of this policy is needed.

Declaration of interests:

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Funding:none received for this work