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Friday’s New York Magazine column is a must read for those following the K-12 school mask controversy.
In May, as the column says, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a large-scale study on the transmission of COVID in American schools. He concluded that the masking then-unvaccinated teachers and improved ventilation with more fresh air were associated with a lower incidence of the virus in schools. “The fact that they seem to be working is reassuring but not surprising,” as the column puts it.
But that’s what the study found that the CDC didn’t tell us was important. The study summary released by the CDC did not include its findings that some other mitigation measures common in American schools are not working. Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and most notably, the requirement to mask students were all found to have no statistically significant advantage.
“In other words, these measures could not be qualified as effective”, as the New York Magazine column says.
Finding out that masks on school children don’t work shouldn’t come as a surprise because it’s “not really controversial,” the column says, for the reasons she explained:
Many of America’s peer countries around the world, including the UK, Ireland, and all of Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy – have exempted children, with varying age limits, from wearing masks in classrooms. Clearly, there is no evidence of an increase in epidemics in schools in these countries compared to schools in the United States, where the solid majority of children wore masks for an entire school year and will continue to do so. do for the foreseeable future. These countries, along with the World Health Organization, whose guidelines on masking children differ significantly from the CDC recommendations, have explicitly recognized that the decision to mask students carries potential academic and social harms for children and may not present a clear advantage.
Scientists the author spoke to believe that omitting the null effects of a student masking requirement was like “pulling files” – putting what you don’t like in a drawer and forgetting about it.
The author challenged the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics to prove that masks on school children work since they both recommend it. Both were struck off. The CDC provided an evasive response and the AAP did not respond at all.
What evidence could other scientists point to to support the recommendation of masks in schools?
No one the author spoke to has been able to find such a robust data set as the CDC results, “that is, a large cohort study directly examining the effects of a requirement to mask”. It was indeed a major study, “both ambitious and revolutionary,” says the column. It covered more than 90,000 elementary students in 169 Georgia schools and was, according to the CDC, the first of its kind to compare the incidence of COVID-19 in schools with some mitigation measures in place at other schools without these measures.
But the CDC delved into the key findings. Read the entire New York Magazine column.
The CDC obviously has some explanation to offer, but officials in states like Illinois are blindly following CDC guidelines. Maybe reporters here will start asking, “What’s your ‘science’ behind hiding kids in schools, and please don’t point to the CDC’s advice? “
COVID remains a deadly risk for certain groups, mainly the elderly and the obese, and the number of cases is increasing. Is it too much to ask if the measures taken are actually working? America is tired of being lying.
-Marc Glennon
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