New York City’s new Health Commissioner has caused anger after announcing that children aged five and under should wear face masks indefinitely, bucking the national trend of ditching masks and going in the face of evidence that kids are at almost zero risk from COVID-19. MailOnline has the story.
“I think it’s indefinite at this point,” Dr. Ashwin Vasan said Friday during a COVID-19 briefing in Queens. “People who have tried to predict what’s going to happen in the future in this pandemic have repeatedly found egg on their face, as they say, and I’m not going to do that here today.”
The woke commissioner, who lives in Brooklyn with his partner and three children, including a four-year-old son, argued he wanted to mask children because under fives are not vaccinated.
“As a father of a two-and-a-half-year old-and two other older kids, I want to keep them as safe as possible. I would love nothing more than to send my son to daycare without a mask,” Vasan said, according to CBS New York.
“But as a scientist, and as a doctor, and an epidemiologist, I want to keep him safe because he’s not eligible for a vaccine.”
His comments sparked fear and fury among frustrated New York parents who face having to force their young children to keep wearing a mask in the face of mounting evidence that they are at little risk.
It also comes as every state, including California which ended its mandate last week, has lifted or announced plans to lift masking requirements in schools.
The lone holdout is Hawaii, which is dropping its indoor mask mandate on March 26th but expected to extend the requirement for schools.
New York state and city also lifted school mask mandates earlier this month.
The nonsense piled upon nonsense of this measure boggles the mind. There is no robust evidence that surgical masks (let alone cloth masks) significantly reduce the spread of respiratory disease including COVID-19. There is little evidence that vaccination does much to reduce the spread for long. Children are at very low risk of serious disease from COVID-19. And Omicron is even milder than earlier variants. Plus masks are harmful. No wonder the rest of the country and world is dropping interventions of all kinds, including mask mandates. But not Dr. Vasan in NYC.
Worth reading in full.
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