Healthcare
CDC urging 2-year-olds to wear masks
In new guidance that was updated on Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said children as young as two years old should wear masks at all times — except while eating and napping — and that will stay in place even after all teachers and staff are vaccinated.
“Everyone 2 years and older should wear a mask covering their mouth and nose when around people who do not live in their household, except when eating or sleeping,” the CDC said Friday. “Teach and reinforce the consistent and correct use of masks for all staff and children aged 2 years and older.”
“Even after child care providers and staff are vaccinated, there will be a need to continue prevention measures for the foreseeable future including wearing masks, physical distancing, and other important prevention strategies outlined in this guidance document.”
According to the new guidelines, in addition to social distancing, children should also wear masks while outdoors.
“Stagger your use of playgrounds and play spaces by reducing the group size in the play area at one time or remaining in cohorted groups while sanitizing shared objects and high touch surfaces between groups,” says the CDC. “If multiple cohort groups need to be in your play area at the same time, consider using fencing or another barrier to designate separate areas for each cohort.”
The CDC also discourages sharing toys between children.
On News4Jax Morning Show, Jennifer Freeman, owner of a daycare in Jacksonville, Fl, said she does not agree with the CDC’s new guidelines for young children.
“We have to look at what is best for children,” Freeman said. “If I don’t have evidence that they’re getting sick because they are not wearing a mask. I know the best way to educate children is for them to smile and talk to each other, to have fun and not be stressed about putting a mask over their face — at least not in a childcare setting.”
The guidance outlines “strategies that child care programs can use to maintain healthy environments and operations, lower the risk of COVID-19 spread in their programs, prepare for when someone is sick with COVID-19, and support coping and resilience.”
Last week, the CDC lessened restrictions on gathering indoors for vaccinated people.
The CDC says that it is okay now for fully vaccinated Americans to gather indoors with other vaccinated individuals without masks or social distancing.
Further, the CDC said that fully vaccinated grandparents can now visit their unvaccinated children and grandchildren.
The CDC has yet to update its travel guidance.
Follow Annaliese Levy on Twitter @AnnalieseLevy
Healthcare
Prestigious Science Journals Confirm Censored Views: Masks at Best Don’t Reduce COVID Infection
Just The News reports that a prestigious science journal has confirmed what was highly censored among social media regarding the novel coronavirus pandemic: “the best-case scenario for one of the most common COVID-19 interventions may be that it has no measurable effect on infection.”
A systematic review of studies of mask mandates for children, published Saturday in the British Medical Journal‘s Archives of Disease in Childhood, found “no association” with infection or transmission in 16 of the 22 observational studies and “critical” or “serious” risk of bias in the six countervailing studies. It got the attention of Elon Musk, owner of X, formerly Twitter.
Emails turned over under public records requests show that National Institutes of Health officials were privately questioning the effectiveness of cloth masks and forthcoming vaccines just a month after then-NIH Director Francis Collins appeared to plot with colleagues to organize a “quick and devastating take down” of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration.
Self-reported SARS-CoV-2 infection was higher the more often people said they wore masks, according to a Norwegian study accepted for publication Nov. 13 in the Cambridge University Press journal Epidemiology and Infection.
An analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Nov. 20 suggests that “scientific censorship is often driven by scientists” and not just “authoritarian officials with dark motives, such as dogmatism and intolerance,” as popularly believed.
The paper, co-authored by dozens of scholars known for challenging orthodoxies in their fields, cited “self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups” as motives for censorious scientists.
Heterodox COVID scholarship may suffer hard-to-prove “camouflaged censorship” by way of “double standards” applied to such research, the paper states.
The findings cast further doubt on the practice of not only public health authorities but scientists themselves in demonizing science-based skepticism of the effectiveness of COVID interventions, particularly in relation to their potential medical, mental and social harms.
That’s now two major reviews in top journals (Cochrane and BMJ) revealing no benefit to public masking. At this point any mask mandate is essentially political, unscientific, and yes–cruel.
Bravo @TracyBethHoeg et al and the work of many others in this space @VPrasadMDMPH… https://t.co/iemhr6sTJj
— Artur Adib (@r2r) December 4, 2023
“Masking recommendations appear to be entirely based on mechanistic and observational data,” they wrote, noting that a much broader systematic review of mask RCTs by the research collaborative Cochrane concluded masks make “little to no difference” against flu or COVID.
(Cochrane unilaterally reinterpreted the study to downplay its findings, over the authors’ objections, after facing media scrutiny.)
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