"But keep masking children" is illustrative of several bad trends in our thinking
I said on Twitter that if you’re planning on writing a history textbook in a few years and want to save a photo for “and this is how much they lost their minds in 2020-2021”, this might be a good one.
Or we can get an explicit comment from the media’s favorite COVID celebrity… er, I mean health expert, who for some reason always speaks as if he’s giving a command even though his words only ever have the power of recommendation.
This is all despite the fact that the risk from COVID-19 to unvaccinated children is so very small that, (although there is more than one way to measure this risk), it is almost certainly lower than the risk to many vaccinated adults.
And other countries (and the UK, for all the craziness of much of its response, is a good example here) have been keen to state that the masking of young schoolchildren is not and never was necessary since the risk to them is so small, and the drawbacks of masking are significant.
So what’s wrong with us here in the US? A few things, I’d suggest:
Most importantly, what you’re seeing here is the technocratic mindset in action. We humans are in control, and we humans are in control via our policy and our technology. Your unaided human biology doesn’t count, only our technology counts. Our technology isn’t available for children yet, so they aren’t allowed to go back to normal.
If you don’t believe me, consider that another huge, elephant in the room example of this is the continued nigh-complete ignoring of natural immunity from “I already had COVID” in CDC guidance and state policy. Why in the world would we just ignore that? Because your unaided human biology doesn’t count, that’s why. That doesn’t represent human control of the situation. (It is reprehensible to see states now try to pressure, via threats of physical discomfort in masking, really anyone, but especially people who have had and recovered from COVID into still getting a vaccine anyway.)
Side comment here because of a discussion this morning but… the people making the decisions have a technocratic mindset. But I think that many of the common people wringing their hands with me these last few days about masking because “but children still can’t get the vaccine” either just don’t realize how extremely small the risk to children is, and/or they’re really bad at making judgments about risk. What their mind is actually doing is “but something bad could happen to someone”, which is true, but lots of major and permanent changes to their own life would be called for if they were really responding consistently to the level of risk they’re concerned about, like “don’t let your child travel via automobile”. (I don’t have a link, but a Scientific American article recently included data from a six-month period in 2020 and pointed out that children aged 5-14 during that period were about 15x more likely to die in a transport accident than to die of COVID-19, and about 5x more likely to be murdered. The risk from COVID to those ages is very small.) Officials have spent a year stoking fear and obfuscating relative risk comparisons in hopes of getting better compliance with their orders, and it “worked” in that surveys show many Americans now objectively massively overestimate the danger posed by COVID.
Anyway. In discussions of this topic elsewhere, someone recommended me the book The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul, apparently a French “Reformed Christian” of some variety. I haven’t gotten to it yet, but if you know the book, I’d be interested in your comment on it below.
It is apparently part of the public health mindset now to never actually admit you were wrong. (“When you mix politics and science, what you get is politics.”) Ergo once a policy is implemented, it cannot be unimplemented unless some major change has occurred that we can use to justify (truly or falsely) that the situation has changed sufficiently that we can now undo the policy. It’s not about masking children, but a recent Michigan Capitol Confidential article gave illustration of this. I hate to quote nearly the whole article, but it’s very short and I don’t think they’d mind. (They’re good folks over there, if you win the lottery go give them money - there, now I’m covered!)
On April 12, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky urged Michigan to “really close things down” to combat the increase in COVID-19 cases.
Walensky said that Michigan needed to “go back to where we were last spring, last summer.” In 2020, Michigan was under a stay-at-home order from March 23 through June 1.
But state officials did not follow Walensky’s recommendation, and the number of new COVID cases has fallen sharply since April 12.
…
Michigan Capitol Confidential has reached out twice to the CDC asking officials to explain what caused Walensky’s advice to be inaccurate. The agency has not responded.
Can I just point out that, in a sane world, this kind of mistake ought to result in firing, or at least a reprimand sufficiently serious that she would never again casually suggest a state ought to lockdown? Imagine how much harm would have been caused to how many people if her advice was followed! And, as we now know, her proposed action was completely and entirely unnecessary. But there will be nary an apology or explanation offered after the fact.
Well not only is masking children in schools not necessary now, lots of data (especially from Europe, where children under age 12 were, in many locations, never masked), very strongly suggests that it never was… but we’ve already dug ourselves into that hole, we’re not going to admit that it wasn’t necessary now. I’ll give you one blurb from a US researcher who was expressing her own confusion with “but keep masking children in schools”.
Regulatory capture, and/or the overinfluence of corporations on regulators, is a well-established phenomenon. Now this is speculative, but the phenomenon is well known and happens all the time. The idea would be that vaccine manufacturers (and people involved in COVID-whatever-control generally) stand to make a ton of money from people using their products (and that is certainly true), ergo they pressure regulators to encourage or mandate use of those same products. There isn’t a doubt in my mind that such pressure is being exerted by the relevant corporations and has been exerted for months now. How successful they have been in directing policy or official communications is something we can only speculate about. But it is a fact that there is a boggles-the-mind amount of money flowing around right now connected to COVID-something, and that’s going to incentivize certain behaviors. It’s not (mostly) a vaccine contract, but a contract issued by Nashville Public Schools is illustrative.
$18,000,000 The Board of Education contract with Meharry Medical College Ventures, Inc., for COVID-19 testing and monitoring for in-person students and staff of Metro Nashville Public Schools is $18,000,000. The contract is for four and a half months. nashville.gov/Metro-Clerk/Co…That’s a contract from Nashville Public Schools for about $170,000 per day to provide COVID-related services. The tweeter followed up to mention that includes tests for, depending on the type of test, $45 to $300 per test, and staff vaccination at $55 per dose. There are huge sums of money to be made here, and without a doubt that is influencing lobbying efforts. (As others have asked - why was there an “emergency” authorization issued to allow the vaccination of teenagers when there is no emergency in that age group?)