by Arjun Walia, The Pulse:
A paper published in Archives of Disease in Childhood found that real-world effectiveness of child mask mandates to prevent COVID-19 transmission and infection has “not been demonstrated with high-quality evidence” and that “the current body of scientific data does not support masking children for protection against COVID-19.”
Researchers performed a systematic review and combed through 597 studies that were published up to February 2023. From those 597, 22 studies were included in the final analysis.
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“There were no radomised controlled trials in children assessing the benefits of mask wearing to reduce SARS-CoV-2 infection or transmission. The six observational studies reporting an association between child masking and lower infection rate or antibody seropositivity had critical (n=5) or serious (n=1) risk of bias; all six were potentially confounded by important differences between masked and unmasked groups and two were shown to have non-significant results when reanalysed. Sixteen other observational studies found no association between mask wearing and infection or transmission. Real-world effectiveness of child mask mandates against SARS-CoV-2 transmission or infection has not been demonstrated with high-quality evidence.”
The importance of this study is that it examined the risks of bias among studies across the board. The higher the risk of bias in a study, the less trustworthy its results can be.
The authors of the study pointed out that the risk of bias in studies across the board was present and sometimes fairly high, but that in the best studies out there (least bias) no benefit was found for masking children.
“Specifically, of the 6 out of 22 observational studies that reported a significant negative correlation between masking and COVID-19 cases, five had critical and one had serious ROB. Of the 16 out of 22 studies failing to find a significant correlation, only 6.3% had critical ROB, while 62.5% had serious and 31.3% had moderate ROB.”
The authors also noted that observational studies have failed to find an association between mask wearing among adults in schools and lower odds of COVID-19, as well as general mask wearing for adults as well.
This new paper took the best research we have with regard to masking and determined what the science truly shows. A similar discovery, published early this year by the Cochrane review, gathered 276,000 participants in randomized clinical trials (RCTs) or cluster RCTs to determine whether community masking had any benefit in reducing flu-like or covid-like illness.
They were not able to conclude masking provided a benefit in reducing the spread of COVID-19.
It’s a shame that instead of proper inquiry, people were pointing fingers and shaming each-other at both ends of the spectrum. There are many crisis’ happening on our planet, but they seem to perpetuate in large part due to our division and our inability to come together and co-exist peacefully.
The Censorship Experience
Renowned medical professionals and scientists who have been censored and ridiculed since the beginning of the pandemic for simply sharing science have been spreading the word regarding this review. It’s another moment that illustrates the breakdown in science and public discourse.
In June 2021, I published an article diving into the current literature (at that time) on mask safety and efficacy, specifically a large meta analysis. By this time, Facebook had already removed at least 16 million pieces of content from its platform and added warnings to approximately 167 million others. YouTube had removed nearly 1 million videos related to, according to them, “dangerous or misleading COVID-19 medical information.”
