School Masks DON'T WORK
Study after study has come back at best inconclusive, and at worst showing that they don't work. Those that don't meet these conclusions have some serious flaws in the method
This week, like hundreds of thousands of New Zealand children, I was forced to wear a mask at school for the very first time.
This has taken an extremely long time for this policy to be enacted when you consider New Zealand’s COVID-zero policies and the fact that countries such as the UK and the US that often haven’t been as tough on COVID as New Zealand have in the past and at present required masks to be worn in schools, colleges and even some kindergartens. Yes, 3 year old’s have been required to wear masks. Just think about how often 3 year old’s touch their face in normal circumstances, and how much more they’ll do it with an uncomfortable mask on, and how this could spread COVID.
There is little to no evidence that masks being mandated in schools do actually work. Most studies on this subject have results that are inconclusive at best, and often either find them to barely work, not work at all or are deliberately misleading.
This last category is the most important one, because I know that many pro-maskers who read this will google ‘do masks work in schools’ and will undoubtedly find some studies that claim they do. Now, I am not a scientist. I am not claiming to be. But when Dr. Vinjay Prasad, who is the associate professor of epidemiology at the University of California, tells me that these studies are mostly hopelessly flawed, I trust him.
Just last week he came out with a new piece focused on a study focused on a study recently published titled the Association of Child Masking with COVID-19 Related Closures in US Childcare Programs, which found that when all kids aged 2 and up in May-June 2020 were 5.8% less likely to be forced to close by COVID cases. On the face of it, that sounds like a reason to get people to wear masks. However, there were problems with the study.
What Prasad suggests is that the 8.6% of daycares that required masking were ever so slightly less likely to be forced to shut down, with 40% of daycares that masked kids at baseline shutting down while 46% who didn’t mask kids shut down. The P = 0.04, apparently, which means that the finding isn’t meaningful at the slightest.
There were also a number of problems with this study, which you can read about in Prasad’s article, which is well worth the read, and his substack is well worth a free subscription (as is this one btw).
One more study that was cited by the CDC showed that Arizona schools that enforced mask mandates were 3.5 times less likely to see an outbreak than schools that didn’t have mask mandates. On the face of it again, you would have to agree that school masking works.
However, there are a number of epidemiologists who simply cannot see this study as reliable. Noah Harber, an expert on these matters, is quoted as saying that the research was “so unreliable that it probably should not have been entered into the public discourse.”
This study focused on Arizona schools from July 15 to August 31 2021, as that’s when they believed schools to open. However, many schools in the counties they focused on started on August 10, while some others were open from July 19. The schools in the latter group, therefore, had an extra 3 weeks to see an outbreak. This was not adjusted for in the study. This is important because a lot of the schools that didn’t have mask mandates were open for this extra period, which is probably the main reason they saw an outbreak, not the lack of forcing children to wear masks. As Jonathan Ketcham told The Atlantic, “If schools with mask mandates had fewer school days during the study, that alone could explain the difference in outbreaks.” This alone means that this study is worthless.
Another problem is that they identified an outbreak at a school as two or more students or staff members getting COVID. Of course, these cases could be unlinked. They could have got COVID from a completely different place. There is no evidence, under this metric, that any of these people got COVID in the school. Yet there was no adjustment made for this in the study.
It also failed to check the vaccination status of students and staff alike, which again could cause a major difference in the results, especially as the vaccine tended to do a good job of stopping infection with the then-dominant Delta variant.
There were also a number of other problems which I won’t get into, but the underlying point is that the study is useless.
And yet, despite this, it is the one most often used by the CDC to claim that school masking works. This suggests that there simply is not enough evidence that masking works in schools for them to actually make a case based on something not widely discredited.
When we tested the vaccines, we used randomized trials to check if they work compared to a control group. We generally haven’t done this to any extent with school masking, and when we have there have been hopeless deficiencies with the studies, like the two I’ve detailed above. As a result of this, I have no choice but to say that the evidence is inconclusive.
The only two randomized studies globally that I could find were from Denmark (which was inconclusive) and from Bangladesh (mild benefits from surgical masks, none from cloth), but neither of these studies included children.
What isn’t inconclusive, however, is the effect that masking children aged 2 and up, like the CDC want you to, can have on students behavior, speech patterns and social abilities.
Initial studies last year from Greece and Italy both found that masking children was creating a barrier to speech recognition and hearing, as well as making it more difficult for kids to recognize facial expressions and what they mean.
What this will cause down the track, when children who are currently very young grow up, is years worth of adults in society that do not have the skills that we all take for granted in daily conversations. These are skills that we all need, and we are depriving young people the chance to get them.
All that I’m trying to say is that the consequences of masks for young children, who the CDC wants to mask, far outweigh the benefits, while the evidence for people such as myself is inconclusive.
If there is no evidence that something works, and it at some point causes some discomfort and irritation, if not actual, genuine, proven harms, why should we mandate that people wear it? That is the question I have for all the people who say that people should be mandated to wear masks in schools.
I am not saying that we should ban them or anything nonsensical like that. I am simply suggesting, like we in New Zealand have done previously, a personal choice. Tell people that they can choose whether or not they want to put on the face mask. Some, inevitably, will. That’s their choice. I have no problem with that. But forcing people to do something that there is no scientific consensus in support of simply doesn’t make sense.