CDC: School Mask Mandates Are Here to Stay

Over the summer, parents and students got a ray of hope that this school year would be filled with less onerous Covid-19 restrictions than the previous year. That hope was dashed in late July when the CDC reversed itself and issued a recommendation that all school-aged children, in grades K-12, should be masked, including all teachers and anyone entering school grounds. Vaccination status is irrelevant, meaning that the masking was universal for anyone on school grounds, even if you’re fully vaccinated, no exceptions.

Amid the ongoing school year, the CDC has now doubled down on the school mask recommendation and said that schools should keep a universal mask mandate in place for the foreseeable future, student vaccination status moving forward still won’t matter:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday it will continue to recommend schools implement mask mandates for students and staff even after young children are allowed to be vaccinated.

The agency’s school mask guidance will remain unchanged as the vaccine rollout for children ages 5 to 11 — which is expected to begin in a matter of weeks — is implemented, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said during a White House COVID-19 briefing.

“Right now we are going to continue to recommend masks in all schools for all people in those schools, and we will look forward to scaling out pediatric vaccination during this period of time,” Walensky said.

As with universal masking in general, many people felt compelled to get vaccinated based on promises of eliminating the need for masks in schools, stores, and everyday life. That happened, for about a month, until the Biden administration decided it was too much, too soon, and told everyone to put a mask back on.

The cat was already out of the bag, or off the face, so to speak, for most people who were already sick and tired of wearing a piece of virtue-signaling cloth to indicate their adherence to the most deeply held beliefs in the Church of Covid. Most retailers and states did not follow suit when the CDC recommended everyone go back to wearing masks over the summertime.

The one exception, however, has been public schools, where most states and large school districts, especially urban areas, have mandated masking since the start of the school year with few exceptions. This move flies contrary to most other developed countries where the negative effects of forcing young children to wear masks all day were considered too much of a burden. Instead, places like the UK decided to opt for regular rapid testing instead, and no masks.

At the same time as the Biden administration plans to vaccinate children as young as 5, the CDC is saying that despite your vaccination status as a student, universal masks aren’t going anywhere. One has to wonder what “science” these people are following? The transmissions rates among young children, especially under age 12, are very, very low. The rate of severe illness and hospitalization is lower than or akin to the seasonal flu, according to the data.

Everyone was promised that if teachers were put at the front of the line, as they were back in January and February of 2021, that it would help get schools back to normal. Teachers were more susceptible than their students, so there was no reason to keep forcing kids to wear masks or learn virtually as long as the teachers were vaccinated.

That promise came and went, and the goalposts were moved to include a requirement for students to be vaccinated as well before classrooms would get back to normal. These things are accomplished incrementally because it’s easier to take small freedoms and control the population by chipping away little by little.

As Business Insider points out, the CDC coupled with the Biden administration is delivering the message all wrong, and ruining any chance they have of accomplishing their goal of getting everyone vaccinated by deploying the bait and switch yet again:

It’d be a great time for the country’s health and science authorities to sell the public on optimism and drive home the “vaccines can get us back to normal” narrative. When it comes to kids specifically, the easing of restrictions in schools could be a huge selling point: “Pretty soon, kids will be able to show their faces at school again!”

But CDC director Rochelle Walensky took the opposite tack on Wednesday.

In a White House COVID-19 Rapid Response Team meeting, she said that even after the vaccine is approved for children, nothing’s going to change about the agency’s guidance on kids wearing masks in schools. Not for a long while.

The CDC has been a trainwreck of messaging ever since the start of the pandemic back in March of 2020. The incompetence spans multiple administrations, with an agency full of confusion and contradictions contained in its own messaging, it’s a wonder anyone listens to anything they say anymore.

Getting vaccinated used to be the holy grail, now it’s just another step along the way that you’ll be required to do, but you still won’t be given your freedoms back. Your children will still be wearing face masks in school, and you’ll be shamed if you ask a question to your school board.

The goal should be to get students back to “normal” in the classroom, and get these stupid masks off their face while they’re in the middle of developing social skills and learning nonverbal communication cues:

That messaging has the added benefit of also being truthful. Masking kids should never be “normal,” especially as they develop social skills. It has to end at some point.

The CDC needs to come up with a metric of “victory” over the virus, a level at which vaccine uptake among schoolchildren warrants an easing of restrictions, and a reasonable definition of acceptable risk. Because zero risk isn’t a life anyone wants to live, even parents for their kids.

The truth here seems to be that the CDC, like most federal agencies, is entirely reactive, and very hesitant to declare victory over anything. Biden tried in July but failed to hold the line. Instead, America shrunk right back into Covid panic again with the Delta variant spreading and the media telling everyone they would need to put a hold on their plans and freedoms once again.

As it has been from the start, the effect on children, especially young children under 10, is completely irrelevant to all the public health experts out there searching for a goal of zero Covid. Australian tried beating everyone into submission but still couldn’t erase all their cases.

There needs to be an end date, a point where the country returns to normal and people go on with life, and school children are no longer subjected as guinea pigs to wearing surgical masks for 7 hours a day.