In incredibly surprising and wholly unexpected turn of events, systematic literature review of child mask mandates finds no evidence they do anything to stop Covid
In the Great Masktard Debate, the idiocy is not uniform, but highly variable. By far the greatest idiocy in this parade of bad evidence, failed predictions and false interventionist hysteria attaches to those who are most eager to force masks upon children. Lest you think all of these idiots have finally gone away because most school mask mandates have fizzled, I quote from the current advice of the American Centres for Disease Control on “The Use and Care of Masks”:
Children ages 2 years and older can wear masks or respirators to protect themselves and others from COVID-19.
Choose a high-quality and comfortable mask or respirator that your child can wear properly. A poorly fitting or uncomfortable mask or respirator might be worn incorrectly or removed often, and that would reduce its intended benefits.
Choose a size that fits over the child’s nose and under the chin but does not impair vision …
If your child has a hard time breathing, gets dizzy, or has other symptoms while you are trying to get the mask to fit better or when using an ASTM F3502 mask or a respirator, choose a cloth or disposable mask. They should continue to protect themselves and others. Consult your healthcare provider if these symptoms do not resolve.
Yes, that’s right: The national public health agency of the dominant Western power still recommends masking children as young as 2 to prevent Covid. They accept that these masks may actually hinder respiration to the point of causing dizziness, in which case they advise parents to use less restrictive cloth masks, which do not even have the pretence of evidence in their favour. All of this is for the demographic that faces the least risk of Covid infection and probably the greatest risk from masking, which interferes among other things with communication and language development.
Now, there is a reason that child masking is a particularly idiotic superstition. In fact, there are two of them.
Reason the First, is that anybody who has observed young children in masks knows that nothing is less likely to stop respiratory pathogens. Kids are constantly touching their faces, rubbing their noses, putting their hands on everything in sight and sticking stuff in their mouths. Because there are few things more obtrusive than face diapers, kids fiddle constantly with their masks while doing all of these other things, in the process transferring whatever pathogens these masks have accumulated onto surfaces, and whatever pathogens might be lurking on surfaces onto their masks. If it were this easy to stop viruses, there would be no viruses at all.
Reason the Second, is that our misbegotten years-long campaign to stop Covid by subjecting children to various systems of hygiene abuse have yielded a multitude of natural experiments, which show that masks are utterly useless. Masked students and unmasked students have the same rates of infection, mposing mask mandates does nothing to stop infections, and lifting them does nothing to further infections. These awkward facts have encouraged various charlatans to crunch numbers selectively and disingenuously to save the masks from their obvious empirical failure. Despite the best efforts of the masketeers, pervasive publication bias and quite frequent open dishonesty, however, the reality is just impossible to deny: Masking kids is stupid, harmful and pointless, and there is no good evidence anywhere that it does anything about Covid.
This long-obvious conclusion has now been reinforced by “Child mask mandates for COVID-19: a systematic review,” a new study co-authored by the excellent Tracy Beth Høeg. One thing it reveals, is how little signal there is in all the noise about child masking. Of 597 papers whose titles or abstracts suggest they might bear on the efficacy of child mask mandates, the authors find that the vast majority provide no data of their own, consist of things like simple case reports, don’t specify the ages of participants or are too poorly designed to shed any light on the question. A mere 22 papers survived this screening and made it into the review. All were observational studies, because after all of this time, nobody has bothered to publish a randomised controlled trial on the efficacy of mask mandates for children, despite all of the mandates we have seen since 2020.
Of these 22 studies, a mere six find a negative association between mandates and Covid incidence. The other 16 find no effect at all. What is more, the authors assess the analytical methods of each study for various risks of bias. All such risks increase the likelihood that a given study will return a bogus result, potentially finding an effect where there is none. They tabulate the various risks present in each paper, illustrating how pervasive are the methodological problems that afflict observational studies in general, and observational mask mandate studies in particular:
There is a very important lesson to draw from this table, and to illustrate it as bluntly as possible, I have drawn two sets of circles. The green circles mark the six studies in this sample that have the most critical overall risk of bias. These are the studies you should probably trust the least. The single red circle, meanwhile, marks the six studies finding that masks prevent Covid in children.
Note the almost total overlap between the studies with the greatest risk of bias and the studies that find child mask mandates are effective. Finding that masks work is a huge red flag for any observational study in this area, and almost certainly indicates serious methodological problems. This is exactly what we would expect research on a pointless and failed medical intervention to look like.
The very act of imposing prior political doctrines on scientific research effectively disincentives robust work, because the better this research is, the less likely it will be to support prevailing orthodoxies. This is because almost no medical interventions ever work. The chances that our bureaucratic betters will have alighted upon an efficacious solution by accident and in advance of all evidence, is in every case very nearly zero. Research on pandemic interventions thus has no choice but to be bad. Once politicians, journalists and grant-makers put their reputations behind idiotic campaigns like masking and social distancing, there emerges a great demand for studies showing that they were merely prescient Followers of Science the whole time. The quality of this Science must accordingly be dialled down until it becomes more likely to yield the misleading, desired results.