The Madness of Masking Toddlers

When you’ve lost the Atlantic….

Obviously, Covid hysteria is winding down. The people are speaking out and they are repudiating the nonsense coming from our self-important and self-aggrandizing health authorities. Dr. Fauci has become conspicuously invisible of late-- a sure sign that sanity is returning to the American mind.

Yesterday, I posted about the ridiculous requirement that toddlers be masked when in preschool in New York City. True enough, the city was taking directives from the CDC, but still. 

Yesterday I was referring to Karol Markowicz’s excellent column in the Wall Street Journal.

Today, here are a few words from Emily Oster, in the Atlantic:

Even as adults and older children all over the country fully shake off the pandemic posture, one group has been left behind in the old world: toddlers. Indeed, although the CDC recently moved to relax COVID guidelines, it continues to recommend universal indoor masking in early-childhood-education programs for those ages 2 and older. 

Accordingly, in New York City and elsewhere, kids in kindergarten and above may attend school maskless, but kids in pre-K and below may not.

Some parents of young kids have been driven insane by this policy. I sympathize—because this policy is completely insane.

No one in the world of public health management noticed that those most likely to be damaged by masking were toddlers, whose ability to learn language would be compromised by masks:

A final point is that although we do not have good evidence on the downsides of masking, and much of the rhetoric is probably overstated, any negative effects are likely to be concentrated in younger children, who are learning to speak and interpret emotional cues. The possible costs of continued mask wearing may be the largest for the very cohort still subject to mandates.

The continued masking of toddlers as we unmask everyone else is not justifiable. This group is at exceedingly low risk of serious disease, and may well be at higher risk—relative to older kids—of adverse consequences. Some policies make sense; some do not. This is one of the latter.