They kept telling us "Follow the Science!" all over the world, almost unanimously, although of course there was no science.
The real virologists, Dr Malone in the US, Dr Montagnier in France and many, many others were silenced while the ones paid by laboratories were non stop on television.
That was then. You would think people have learned since? You would be wrong. The next pandemic will prove this although now it will of course be much harder to convince most people. We don't even know the name of the latest variant!
But the science about the consequences of the Covid madness is much less kind and starting to show up. A generation of children has been badly damaged, individually, in their ability to learn but more ominously socially, in their ability to live with others.
Does it matter? Hard to tell. The social, economic, technological and military problems are piling up so fast that in the end, maybe not!
Still, you would believe that elected governments in democratic countries would have the interest of their citizens at heart but that would be very "last century" as a concept. Today's governments are promoted jet-set applicants working on behalf of their corporate sponsors. The wet dream of Mussolini and his fascist colleagues with their vision of the fusion of government and large corporations.
They did it, Benito! Although of course the future will look nothing like the futuristic one you were dreaming about. Democracy is messy but free people are happier on their own than even the kindest tyranny can achieve, because they find solutions that the most well intended political systems from communist to fascist never seen to be able to stumble on in their technocratic pursuit of social perfection. And still the machine marches on, ignoring its mistakes, blinded by the light of salvation which always seems to be far ahead at the end of an endless tunnel. Burning bodies to save souls in the Middle Ages, now they are burning souls to save bodies. Is that what we call progress?
Authored by Guy Gin via DailySceptic.org,
A new systematic review has been published in Archives of Disease in Childhood, one of the journals of the British Medical Journal, by Sandlund et al. titled ‘Child mask mandates for COVID-19: a systematic review‘.
Since no randomised controlled trials have even been conducted on child mask-wearing or mask mandates, the authors systematically reviewed observational studies and included 22 in the final analysis: six found child mask mandates were associated with lower rates of infection; the other 16 didn’t.
But the studies that found they didn’t weren’t just greater in quantity; they were higher quality too.
Of the six studies reporting a significant negative correlation between masking and COVID-19 cases, five had critical and one had serious ROB [risk of bias].
Of the 16 studies failing to find a significant correlation, one (6.3%) had critical, 10 (62.5%) had serious, five (31.3%) had moderate and none had low ROB. [emphasis added here and below]
In short, almost all studies with critical ROB had pro-mask results, while all studies with moderate ROB did not.
Table 2 below gives a breakdown of the various types of bias the reviewers found. The six studies with pro-mask results are listed first.
All six studies reporting a negative association were potentially confounded by crucial differences between masked and unmasked groups, including the number of instructional school days, differences in school size, systematic baseline differences in case rates in all phases of the pandemic, testing policies, contact-tracing policy differences and teacher vaccination rates.
Almost all these confounds seem to apply to the worst of the bunch, Jehn et al., who found “the odds of a school-associated COVID-19 outbreak in schools without a mask requirement were 3.5 times higher than those in schools with an early mask requirement”. Unfortunately, this study was so bad even pro-maskers interviewed by the Atlantic said it was embarrassing. Among its many problems was that even though the study period was July 15th to August 31st 2021, “Some [schools] didn’t begin class until August 10th; others were open from July 19th or July 21st. That means students in the latter group of schools had twice as much time — six weeks instead of three weeks — in which to develop a Covid outbreak.” No wonder the researchers didn’t want to share the raw data.
That study was published in the U.S. CDC’s in-house propaganda rag Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, but even prestigious peer-review journals like the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) have published similar rubbish by pro-mask scientists who gerrymandered results through a conveniently selected study design, as Sandlund et al. explain.
The Boston observational study [Cowger et al.] stated they could infer causality between lifting school mask mandates and increases in student and staff cases by using a difference-in-differences technique. However, a subsequent reanalysis called the methodology and results of this study into question and failed to find the same association when expanding the population to include the entire state or using different statistical analysis and also found the initial study’s results were likely confounded by differences in prior infection rates.
Interestingly, whereas as all pro-mask studies with critical risk of bias were done in North America (five in the U.S.; one in Canada), most of the studies with the lowest risk of bias were done in Europe.
In a Spanish study of almost 600 000 children, the researchers did not find a significant difference in cases between unmasked five-year-olds and masked six-year-olds; instead, case rates correlated closely with the age of children, which was also observed in another Spanish study. … A lack of significant association between masking children and risk of COVID-19 was also reported by the U.K. Department of Education. … A Finnish study compared case rates in children with and without mask mandates in 10-12 year-olds, and the authors found no reduction in COVID-19 case rates when mask recommendations were extended to include 10-12 year olds.
All this means that Sandlund et al. come to the inevitable conclusion that “real-world effectiveness of child mask mandates against SARS-CoV-2 transmission or infection has not been demonstrated with high-quality evidence”.
But the issue of child mask mandates isn’t just about mask effectiveness; it’s about potential harms too, such as negative effects on language learning and communication.
Mask wearing causes reduced word identification and impedes the ability to teach and evaluate speech. There is a link between observation of the mouth and language processing, and people of all ages continue to focus on the mouth when listening to non-native speech.
Masks may also have negative psychological effects on children too.
There is also evidence that masks hinder social-emotional learning and language/literacy development in young children. Children with special-education needs and autism may be disproportionately impacted by mask requirements as they rely heavily on facial expressions to pick up social cues. Misinterpretation of facial expressions increases anxiety and depression in individuals. School environments with mask mandates were also found to have increased anxiety levels compared to those without mandates.
Additionally, the physiological effects of masks may be worse for children than adults.
In addition, mask wearing has been associated with physiological harm — many of which are more frequently reported in children than in adults — which may have multiple negative downstream effects, including reduced time and intensity of exercise, additional sick days, reduced learning capacity, and increased anxiety. Masking has also been found to lead to rapid increase in CO2 content in inhaled air — higher in children than in adults — and to levels above acceptable safety standards for healthy adult workers, which may rise further with physical exertion.
This leads to a simple cost-benefit analysis of child mask mandates.
Costs: potentially language learning and communication issues, worse psychological well-being and negative physiological effects.
Benefits: None
In conclusion, Sandlund et al. recommend that “Adults who work with children should be educated about the lack of clear benefits and the potential harms of masking children”.
Even though it would be too little too late, it’d be nice if some of the various governments around the world that forced kids to mask followed this recommendation. It’s a shame they won’t.
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