All children should be back to learning in person this year. What’s more, they shouldn’t be forced to wear masks.
The American Academy of Pediatrics is recommending that everyone over the age of 2 wear masks, regardless of vaccination status, as part of its recommendation to return to in-person learning. That includes everyone from 5-year-olds in kindergarten to high school students who have already received the full course of vaccination shots.
This view is, of course, shared by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Fauci has never seen a restriction he didn’t like during the pandemic (except for when he lied about the efficacy of masks at the outset). He feels that if the AAP has reached this conclusion, “I think that’s a reasonable thing to do.”
Unlike Fauci, the AAP has earned some goodwill thanks to its push last year to help ensure that students could return to in-person learning for fall 2020. But this is a request that goes too far. Mandatory masking for children to protect them from COVID-19 is simply unnecessary. We know that the risk to children is incredibly low, and this proposed requirement, devoid as it is of scientific justification, smacks of a desire to placate mask scolds with needless restrictions.
According to the AAP’s most recent data, children account for 0%-0.26% of all COVID-19 deaths, despite making up 14% of all COVID in the United States. More importantly, 0%-0.03% of child virus cases result in death. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a total of 335 children under the age of 18 have died from the virus — a tragedy in each case, certainly, but not a justification for mandatory masking by roughly 73 million children, including the vaccinated, for seven hours a day, five days a week.
Lockdown policies have been far too tough on children already. There was no reason they should not have been learning in person last fall. And today, with 68% of adults having received at least one dose of the vaccine (not to mention those who have some protection against the virus thanks to natural immunity), deaths are at the lowest they have been since the coronavirus was unleashed on the world.
We never needed to mask children to protect them, and now, with vaccines readily available, we don’t need to mask children to protect adults, either.
We do not need to burden children with continued restrictions or hurdles that prevent them from returning to normal life. Mandatory masking for children is a solution in search of a problem. Accommodations can be made for any children who would be at an increased risk of the virus. Forcing 73 million of them to continue to jump through hoops is unnecessary and cruelly so.
