However, a new re-analysis of the data used in the study, produced by Ambarish Chandra and Tracy Høeg, finds that school masking is not associated with pediatric case rates.
Chandra and Høeg’s analysis, which uses a larger population and longer time interval, is more comprehensive than the CDC’s. Their results show no relationship between mandating masks in schools and COVID case rates in students. The authors also highlight problems with the initial CDC study, including context surrounding biases in the CDC’s medical journal and related scientific publications.
New Yorkers, you’re worldly. You have friends in other cities, other countries. Ask them: Are you still masking 2- to 4-year- olds?
After they get over the shock that anyone would have ever masked 2- to 4-year-olds, ask them what they think about New York mandating it today. Tell them that until a few weeks ago, these same kids were forced to mask outdoors. It’s June 2022, and New York City has decided that all remaining COVID-19 mitigation burdens should rest only on the shoulders of one group: toddlers.
Your friends will ask: But why?
There is no answer. There has never been any science to suggest masking any children, much less small children, was a good idea. But for the kids learning language, learning how to read facial expressions, learning how to emote in the world, to still be masking when no one else has to, shows a deep disregard for children as a whole.
Tell your friends that your city has a good reason to continue to harm children with this masking and hear them laugh in your face. No other city, no other state, is force-masking toddlers. Most countries have never masked this age group whatsoever. New York is on an island of abject foolishness all on its own.
The idea that these kids must be masked because there is no vaccine for them is just plainly untrue. Children are uniquely not susceptible to COVID. We’ve known this for over two years. Instead of being grateful for this blessing, we’ve treated 2-year-olds as if they’re 80. If 2- to 4-year olds were dying of COVID at the same rate as older people, they would have been at the front of the vaccine line, not at the very back.
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How dare the mayor continue to show his face around the city when this idiotic policy continues to exist? How much longer will children continue to have their development paused while the mayor hobnobs, maskless, of course, with celebrities?
But the real question is: When will New Yorkers finally have had enough of the anti-science way their city fought the virus? When will they snap out of the conformist silence they’ve all sunk into, stand up and say “this is wrong.” Ask your friends, New Yorkers, ask them.
(DBx: One of the many still-relevant – and depressing-to-ask – covid-related questions for me is why so many parents with toddlers continue to believe that their unvaccinated young children are at grave danger from covid. I have met over these past two years probably 15 or 16 sets of parents who genuinely believe that, until their very young children are fully vaccinated against covid, these children face significant odds of suffering and even dying from covid. When appropriate, I gently share with these parents the fact that covid poses almost no danger to children. Invariably I’m answered with blank stares, as if my message reveals me to be a kindly but ignorant fool who is best ignored. My most recent encounter with such a parent was just days ago. An intelligent, highly educated, worldly, and very caring mother of a three year old told me that she will feel a great deal of relief when her young daughter finally gets vaccinated against covid. Why do so many people still not know, or not believe, a central fact about covid – namely, its steep age profile – that should relieve every parent of worry about their young children suffering from this virus?)
In response to this news about the return of the masking of schoolchildren in Sacramento, Tracy Høeg tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
👇 what happens when people are misled about what the scientific data show
👇 what happens when physicians & scientists who know masking children does little to nothing & harms outweigh the benefits are silenced:Kids pay the price
Yet after sitting on the fluvoxamine application for nearly five months—most other EUAs have been approved within two—the FDA notified Dr. Boulware this month that “the treatment benefit of fluvoxamine was not persuasive when focusing on clinically meaningful outcomes.” How is prevention of severe illness not a clinically meaningful outcome?
The FDA quibbled that the “timing of the trials spanned different periods” of the pandemic and “demographics of the patient populations were not uniform.” Huh? These are trial strengths since they show the benefits can be generalized across different patient populations, settings and variants. That has proved not to be the case for monoclonal antibodies or even vaccines, which have become less effective against new variants.
The agency also said there are plenty of alternative treatments available. Never mind that the Biden administration has been warning it may need to ration antiviral and monoclonal treatments unless Congress coughs up billions to purchase more. A 10-day course of fluvoxamine costs about $5 compared with $500 to $700 for Paxlovid and molnupiravir. Monoclonals cost about $2,000.
Who’d a-thunk that government would use fear of covid to spend money excessively and wastefully?
Alex Gutentag explains that the covid cult inflicted lasting damage on children. Two slices:
As the severity of these repercussions comes to light, some outlets—notably those that most aggressively advocated for lockdowns and masking—have been eager to suggest that we are now aware of the overwhelmingly negative consequences of these policies thanks to “new research” that has only just become available to fair-minded people, who can therefore be forgiven for having adopted the course they did. But to many doctors and scientists, the damage to kids caused by COVID-19 panic was neither inevitable nor surprising. Rather, it was the result of the public health establishment’s conscious choice to eschew rational cost-benefit analysis in favor of pet cultural theories and political gamesmanship. For those who applied the scientific method to the available evidence, the consequences were already clear just a few weeks into the pandemic. “It was not at all true that people in healthcare and public health were unaware of what was going on with children,” Dr. [Jeanne] Noble told me. “They were not ignorant.”
What happened to the United States’ kids was not the result of an innocent mistake. It was the product of a concerted campaign of censorship and demonization of dissenting voices in support of premises that turned out to be wildly harmful to children. Scientists, doctors, and parents who urged schools to reopen based on available evidence were systematically ignored and silenced by politicians, public health bureaucrats, and legions of dedicated online COVID-19 activists, while the most vulnerable children in U.S. society suffered the consequences. Only by telling the story of how that betrayal happened is it possible to start understanding the why.
In 2020, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University, was invited along with other scientists to the White House. “It was supposed to be a conversation between us and Deborah Birx and Tony Fauci,” Dr. Bhattacharya told me, “but both Birx and Fauci declined to be there.”
Due in part to his background in health economics, Dr. Bhattacharya knew that school closures would have long-term consequences for children. It is a consistent finding in the field, he said, that “when children stay in school longer, they lead healthier lives, they lead longer lives, and they are less likely to be poor throughout their lives.”
It was clear already in the spring of 2020 that the risk of severe COVID-19 for children was far lower than the risk posed by long-term school closures. Children were shown to be less efficient spreaders of COVID-19 than adults, negating the argument that they would become unique vectors of disease and endanger their teachers or the adults with whom they lived. “That meant that schools are special,” Dr. Bhattacharya said. “They’re not this dangerous environment that people envision them to be.” When Sweden kept schools open for children up to age 16 without masks in the spring of 2020, for example, not a single child died, and teachers were not at elevated risk for severe COVID-19.
Armed with this knowledge, Dr. Bhattacharya’s main goal at the White House meeting was to make the case for reopening schools. “I came with a document with all the scientific evidence I’d been reading about,” he said. “I was shocked to see that the leaders of the public health response, people like Deborah Birx, were not interested in talking about that evidence. In fact, they wouldn’t want to even be in the same room with me.”
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Time and again, a narrow group of public health officials and academics demanded public and professional obedience to certain policies without acknowledging or even weighing the possible downsides. When Dr. Bhattacharya served as an expert witness in defense of Florida’s school-reopening order, it struck him, he told me, that the experts on the other side refused to consider the harms caused by school closures: “It’s as if they’d come to a pre-ordained conclusion rather than reasoning their way to what the right thing to do was.”
There was “a small cartel of experts who controlled the policy, who controlled the messaging, who controlled even who was allowed to participate in this debate or discussion,” Dr. Bhattacharya said. “We can never let that happen again.”
Kate Dunlop describes China’s “cruel and pointless massacre of pets” as “an exercise in power.” A slice:
Killing pets and other animals to save us from the next ‘potential’ zoonotic jump is not on the same terror level but keeps the masses in line and the fires of fear stoked. The links between animal cruelty and human violence are long established and well understood. Abusing companion animals who are a source of comfort to people with little else is a well-trodden path for domestic abusers and political tyrants alike. Such cruelty convinces people that they are powerless and increases their passivity and fear. Where the state is the abuser, it leads to widespread apathy in the population and greater compliance.
Between September 2020 and January 2021, there were roughly 800,000 laboratory tests reported for the flu. Total. Not per day. Total. In ~4 months. That’s not a low number either, a report from the 2015-2016 flu season estimated less than 900,000 tests were run.
The United States in recent years has never tried to find every single case of the flu as we have been attempting to do with COVID. We’ve now run over 1 billion COVID tests. See how well mass testing works to control the spread of a highly infectious respiratory virus?
This obsessive desire to find every possible positive test result for a disease that will inevitably infect everyone can, and undoubtedly has, led to a significantly higher proportion of deaths from other causes being attributed to COVID. The more you look, the more you’ll find.
