The great absurdity of our time is that schools, the safest place when it comes to the coronavirus, have been turned into mandatory mask zones all over the country, even at times when known superspreader vectors such as the subways in New York City, Black Lives Matter protests and violent riots, bars, and restaurants have gone completely unregulated.
When Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin put pen to paper for his first acts in office, it was a breath of fresh air in a state that had long been suffering from an acute case of nanny-statism.
Parents, the ruling Democrats had held, are not capable of raising their own children and therefore should have no say in their education. And those children needed to be overprotected from a virus that the data demonstrate poses them negligible risk. The fact is there is absolutely no scientific justification for making children under the age of 12 wear masks for seven hours a day at school. This is why the World Health Organization does not recommend mask mandates for children and European countries do not impose such mandates.
In clinging to their mask mandates, Virginia school districts admit that they are relying almost entirely on a single debunked study that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to promote, which one scientist has called “so unreliable that it probably should not have been entered into the public discourse.” This study found that there were 3.5 times as many outbreaks in Arizona counties lacking mask mandates. But note that it defines an outbreak as two or more cases in which the infected students were in proximity of each other and unmasked. Right away, this is going to skew the results. And more fundamentally, the use of outbreaks instead of cases is already questionable. Also, many of the schools in the dataset were not open at the time the research was conducted. The study failed to control for the vaccination status of staff and teachers.
It is true that human instinct entails an almost irresistible urge to protect the young — even from the smallest risks. But the whole point of “following the science” is to resist one’s own irrational instincts when the data point in the opposite direction. And this has been the case from the very beginning of the pandemic when it comes to children.
Early on, it was already clear that children do not usually suffer serious cases of COVID, and further, they do not spread it the way they typically tend to spread colds and the flu during the school year. No reliable evidence to the contrary has ever been produced.
If those in power were actually following the science, they would have closed down most adult activities long before they considered placing any restrictions on schools. Sadly, this is not the way the world works. In this world, adults get their way even when they are wrong. Children don’t vote, and Democrats in power want to nullify their interests by undercutting their parents, the only people morally obligated to look out for their interests.
A number of school districts have announced their intention to defy Youngkin’s lawful order. They are completely in the wrong, and their COVID alarmism is part of the reason Youngkin was elected in the first place.
Those who pay lip service to science need to step up and dispel the irrational fear or else shut up. It is time to throw away the mask as an implement of superstition and let children breathe again.
