Masking School Children Can Solve Systemic Racism, Claims The New England Journal Of Medicine
You thought it was over didn’t you?
True to the text of the tweet, that was really published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Mandatory masking of children can help fight institutional racism is what is claimed by the authors of the paper “Lifting Universal Masking in Schools — Covid-19 Incidence among Students and Staff” by Tori L. Cowger, Ph.D., M.P.H., Eleanor J. Murray, Sc.D., M.P.H., Jaylen Clarke, M.Sc., Mary T. Bassett, M.D., M.P.H., Bisola O. Ojikutu, M.D., M.P.H., Sarimer M. Sanchez, M.D., M.P.H., Natalia Linos, Sc.D., and Kathryn T. Hall, Ph.D., M.P.H. They state the following in the Boston Mask Study paper (emphasis added):
“Our results support universal masking as an important strategy for reducing Covid-19 incidence in schools and loss of in-person school days. As such, we believe that universal masking may be especially useful for mitigating effects of structural racism in schools, including potential deepening of educational inequities.”
If you think the masking topic has died down, you can probably presume such a paper published in such a prestigious journal assures you that the topic remains very much with us.
This paper is, in fact, being used across the country and internationally to argue that mandatory mask policies must be brought back to schools. As I will show in this response to that paper, the data upon which the paper is based is such poor data that this paper should be retracted. I will not debate the topic of institutional racism at this time, as the paper is not really about this topic. That topic is simply slapped on superficially. Allow me to take my analysis beyond such a claim and into a few other elements in the paper, that may be less salacious, but which are far more important.
At the heart of the paper is a study that looks at the difference between Massachusetts schools that removed mandatory masks in the winter of 2022 and Massachusetts schools that removed mandatory masks in the summer of 2022. It discusses some of the differences indicated in that four month period.
No Surprise: Mismanaged Schools Were More Likely To Mask Longer, Well-Managed Schools Were More Likely To Mask Less
Here’s a pro-tip hidden in the pages of this insightful study: if a school masks a child, you are in the wrong school, not only for that reason alone, but because there are likely to be so many other problems with that school.
Study authors had an agenda, so they didn’t point out that face masks caused harm to students — a long understood detail and one that I cover in depth in Face Masks Hurt Kids. Nor did study authors clearly point out that masks were an indicator of a school being poorly run. That would be a potent and helpful, headline-worthy warning for parents to know about. Instead they say it this way:
“In our study, school districts that chose to sustain masking requirements longer tended to have school buildings in worse physical condition and more students per classroom, and these districts had higher percentages of students and staff already made vulnerable by historical and contemporary systems of oppression (e.g., racism, capitalism, xenophobia, and ableism).”
Though study authors draw very different conclusions, their data points to a useful point that has been a part of much of my writing for the past 2 1/2 years — The mandatory mask policy is a great litmus test for identifying people that you do not want to ever trust to do the right thing, least of all someone you want to leave your pride and joy alone with for a double digit number of hours each week.
New England Journal of Medicine: How To Identify The Crappiest School Districts To Stay Away From — Just Look At Their Masking Policies
Study authors elaborate further on the above. This elaboration makes it even more evident that you probably do not want to have your child around such a school — that masking is a warning sign of much more.
Study authors present a picture of masked schools being full of children at the edges of society. While one might want to take the greatest care with such students and to provide them with the most solid, well-grounded, reliable education and care, study authors indirectly indicate that such children are most likely to be experimented on by their caregivers.
This is understandable since parents are less likely to be involved and less likely to have much of a voice. Make no mistake, the mass masking of children is an experiment. Shockingly, authors ignore the injustice of this behavior by educators, treating it, instead as entirely normal.
“School districts that chose to sustain masking requirements longer had higher percentages of low-income students, students with disabilities, and ELL students (Figure 3A), as well as higher percentages of Black and Latinx students (Figure 3B) and Black and Latinx staff (Figure 3C), than school districts that chose to lift masking requirements earlier. In addition, school districts that chose to sustain masking requirements longer tended to have school buildings that were older and in worse physical condition (e.g., with outdated or absent ventilation or filtration systems) and to have more students per classroom (Figure 3D).”
This evokes a lesson similar to the horrific, stomach-turning New York Willowbrook experiments, in which healthy handicapped children were fed the feces of sick people and injected with the body fluid of sick people to induce hepatitis in the healthy so that researchers could then study vaccines against hepatitis.
The below is from a New York Times piece about Willowbrook back when some of their editors still allowed the doctrine of informed consent to be promulgated. This was allowed into the arts section of the paper in 2013. Most other sections of The New York Times had been scrubbed of informed medical consent arguments by 2008 or 2009 at the latest.
“Less well known is the story of the research conducted at Willowbrook in the 1950s and 1960s by a team led by Dr. Saul Krugman, an eminent pediatrician and researcher at the New York University School of Medicine (the same institution, to its credit, where the film is being shown). Reasoning that hepatitis was rampant at Willowbrook anyway, Dr. Krugman devised a study in which newly admitted children were injected with active hepatitis virus. Following these children over time, he hoped, would not only provide knowledge about the different viruses that caused hepatitis but also potentially lead to the discovery of preventive vaccines.
“The concept of informed consent, in which anyone entering an experiment needs to be told and understand all of the potential risks and benefits, was much less developed in the decades after World War II. Still, Dr. Krugman did generate an early version of a consent form for parents to sign. And the research was funded by the United States Army (which was interested in hepatitis among soldiers) and approved by the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene.”
The Tuskegee experiments in which patients were untreated for syphilis while being told they were being treated took place during this same period and tends to get more attention.
Sociopaths have always preyed on the frail and those on the edges of society. The data of Boston Mask Study authors shows that children at neglected schools are attracting the attention of the sociopaths of this era.
Can you imagine such a thing being done to children in this era by trusted public officials and industry respected researchers? I can. Because I realize that history does not often repeat itself. It merely rhymes. Face masks on children are a revolting experiment. They harm the wearer. There is no medical reason for a healthy child to be in a mask. Yet the children were the among the last to be unmasked and are being discussed as needing to be re-masked first?
“Why?” you may ask. Is it because it benefits the children. No. Certainly not, though study authors use bad data to suggest that.
The reason children were the among the last to be unmasked and are being discussed as needing to be re-masked first, is because sociopaths have always preyed on the frail and those on the edges of society. It is the precise reason that masks remain on patients in hospitals, group homes for the handicapped, and facilities for the elderly — because an ill person has a hard time defending themselves from experimentation and manipulation.
Many more revolting experiments exist in this era conducted on those who are most frail. Face mask policies are among the most visible and most preposterous and serve as a gateway to other revolting policies. Public health researchers recognize this — if they can convince you to put your kid in a mask, they can convince you to do so much worse.
The Boston Mask Study is Based on Bad Data
The most important part of all of this is the fact that the data these researchers rely on to advance their point here is virtually useless, because it is based on such bad sources.
“For each school district, data regarding weekly Covid-19 cases, student enrollment, and staffing during the 2021–2022 school year were publicly available from the Massachusetts DESE.33,34 Throughout the study period, DESE required standardized weekly reporting of all positive tests for Covid-19 among students and staff, regardless of symptoms, testing type or program (e.g., testing of symptomatic persons or pooled polymerase-chain-reaction testing), and testing location (community setting or school setting). Details regarding DESE reporting requirements are provided in the Supplementary Appendix. DESE strongly encouraged, and provided full funding for, school districts to opt in to standardized Covid-19 testing programs; 2311 Massachusetts schools (approximately 95%) participated in at least one such program. From 1 month before the statewide masking policy was rescinded through the end of the school year, statewide testing recommendations did not differ according to masking or vaccination status (Table S2).35”
Authors write “the lifting of masking requirements was associated with an additional 44.9 cases per 1000 students and staff (95% confidence interval, 32.6 to 57.1), which corresponded to an estimated 11,901 cases and to 29.4% of the cases in all districts during that time.”
This is contrary to the data produced by the 14 randomized controlled trials reviewed by Xiao et al. in the paper “Nonpharmaceutical Measures for Pandemic Influenza in Nonhealthcare Settings—Personal Protective and Environmental Measures” published in the CDC’s peer-reviewed Emerging Infectious Diseases in May 2020.
As Cowger et al. in the Boston Mask Study contradicts all gold standard laboratory confirmed RCT studies to date, it is with keen interest that I read this research.
The data on this study appears to be so poorly sourced that I am surprised to see such data used. Authors write,
“Throughout the study period, DESE [Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education] required standardized weekly reporting of all positive tests for Covid-19 among students and staff, regardless of symptoms, testing type or program (e.g., testing of symptomatic persons or pooled polymerase-chain-reaction testing), and testing location (community setting or school setting).”
The sensitivity analyses conducted by study authors is useful, but is unable to make up for poorly sourced data, as such it has here been misused.
Furthermore, the Massachusetts standardized policy to compare a non-symptomatic child with a symptomatic child belies medical practice and calls into the question the usefulness of the test being administered. It may have been a stop-gap measure that was resorted to in a difficult environment, but there is little reason that such a stop-gap be used as the foundation of science moving forward.
At best, this collection of data was an early warning sign that could have been useful with uncertainty around ideas such as community spread and asymptotic spread. That uncertainty is no longer the case. But if we are going to be honest, not even that data should ever have been relied on. Polymerase-chain-reaction testing is a poor diagnostic tool on its own. Patient symptoms are the foundation of disease diagnosis.
Total garbage data.
Of further significance is that the study compared two inner city masked districts with suburban districts that lifted masking earlier at staggered times. The study relied on self reporting. The suburban students are more likely to be vaccinated than the inner city kids — a matter getting far less attention than deserved, seeing that the vaccinated are more likely to get sick than unvaxxed. To recommend masking based on this one study when dozens of other studies in the US, Europe and rest of world show masking had no effect on cases or worse, not to mention the real problems caused by masks in mental health, language skills, socialization, and far more problems is to depart from the study of science and to cherry-pick results for in an “ends-justifies-the-means” example of political expediency, that is used to supersede any possible benefit to one’s health.
And, to top it all off, study authors have the audacity to suggest that you have no business talking about any of this unless you agree with their incredibly limited and unrealistic view of the world. That’s right. They offer the opinion that if you disagree, you need to be prevented from having a voice in this debate, because your disagreement about this matter of mandates medical experimentation is simply proof of your ignorance about race.
New England Journal of Medicine: Studying Marxism is required to make a proper decision on face mask policy
You may have though Covid-19 measures were actually about sickness and dying, overwhelmed hospitals and healthcare facilities. Study authors do not appear to share that view of what Covid-19 precautions are actually about. It is about much more. In fact, it is about so much more that you cannot even engage in the discussion about Covid-19 policies without being thoroughly versed on Marxist theory.
Let me allow study authors to educate you on this (emphasis added):
“Understanding Covid-19 policy decisions requires attention to power and existing historical and sociopolitical contexts.10,40 Structural racism and racial capitalism operate through multiple pathways, including higher levels of household crowding and employment in essential industries and lower levels of access to testing, vaccines, and treatment; these structural forces differentially concentrate the risk of both SARS-CoV-2 exposure and severe Covid-19 in low-income and Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities.9-11,18”
This is quite an important claim contained in the paper, since it attempts to revoke the ability of parents and community members to enter into this conversation. The masking policy requires “attention to power and existing historical and sociopolitical contexts,” which is code for Marxist thought and critical theory. If you are not a student of Marxist thought, you have no place speaking up about the masking topic. The statement presumes that every student of Marxist thought arrives at relatively similar conclusions.
Contrary to that, what matters are the following. A face mask on a child to prevent a respiratory illness is unsafe and ineffective. That means a school district has an obligation to inform parents about that. The forced wearing of a mask is abuse. That means a school district has the obligation to address this issue with parents who forcibly mask their children or harangue their children to remain masked. This paper addresses no such topic.
The paper instead is built on the narrative that masks are beneficial and must therefore only be conversed about by those who hold a select set of views that support masking polices. It is truly a first amendment argument — you have no right to speak that which your masters do not wish to hear and you have no right to redress grievances unless you come with grievances built upon a very narrow ideological framework: Marxist theory.
Each year about 1% of the population dies in the United States. Each year people get sick of respiratory illnesses and die. In the Northern Hemisphere this happens from approximately early October to late April. The biological events of 2020 were not the great catastrophe. The political, governmental, cultural responses were.
You Have A Responsibility At A Time Such As This
Recognizing the harmful and destructive nature of such policies, it is incumbent upon you to familiarize yourself with the research that is being used to continue the emergency measures in some places and return us to emergency measures in other places. The data in the Boston Face Mask study is very bad data, used with a spirit of deceit and manipulation.
With the experience of the Ides of March 2020 behind us, we are long beyond the point of being able to trust those who claim that they are trustworthy.
If you do not understand them, it is incumbent upon you to oppose them. Keeping things as they have long been works. Hasty trends fall short and fail those who most need timeless wisdom.
To oppose such nonsense in your own life is well within your control. If you feel like it is not, I have written the bestselling “Face Masks in One Lesson” to help you with that, as well as its follow-up, “Face Masks Hurt Kids.” You have the power to steer yourself and your family through this time. The only question is whether you have the will. If not, let me help you with that, dear lion.
Passing peer review might mean that the peers were equally demented.
By peer review they mean all the other peers that sold out their oath, the Hippocratic oath, then they are hypocrites with no oath, integrity, scruples, humanity or any other value. It is show me the money and I will say anything. Someday all these beasts will have to answer for their crimes, enabling mass murder just like the Nazis, standing before the world and being asked why. The old false answer will not do in this case, and it was I was just following orders, so it was not my fault. If you know something is illegal and immoral, then you know what morality is so no excuses. The social media platforms are guilty as well as they have engaged in truth suppression knowingly. I have to say that Elon Musk is no friend of truth as he is perceived to be. Just because he bought Twitter does not mean he is going to allow free speech. He was funded lock stock and barrel by the deep state, and his research on AI, brain chips, and his cooperation DOD and Pentagon satellites he sent up for them should make any thinking person question. He talks about the dangers of all the verry thing he is invested in creating??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????