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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that people who are fully vaccinated will be able to remove their masks. However, should children use masks in school? The CDC says that they still should.
Although experts, teachers and parents are demanding that the measure be lifted for children, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky reported that children will still be required to wear masks.
Children who have not been vaccinated should continue to wear masks as well as be kept 6 feet apart. The CDC recommends facemasks for 2-year-olds in public settings and when they are with people outside the home. They also advise masks in schools.
Should children use masks in school?
The guidelines to perpetuate facemasks on children contradicts the CDC’s recent announcement that fully vaccinated Americans can remove facemasks indoors in most circumstances.
Walensky’s announcement also came after he paradoxically called it a “historic day” that more than 4 million children, ages 12 to 17 have already been vaccinated.
“We’ve really made great strides across the country to ensure that people have access to vaccines,” he said, adding that even so, many children ““will likely not have the opportunity to be fully vaccinated before the end of the school year.”
Experts show concern about the confusion that may arise from the fact that adults can already remove their masks, but children cannot.
“Physicians and health care providers are also concerned because our children under 12 are now the vulnerable population,” Dr. Payal Kohli, M.D., told Telemundo.
“It will really confuse children and send a lot of mixed messages when their parents can take the mask off, but children under 12 are not yet, they still have to be careful to wash their hands and it’s going to be difficult for parents without modeling that behavior,” Kohli said.
Scientists have already stated that children do not need to wear masks
In April, YouTube censored Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, and a group of experts who questioned the use of facemasks on minors.
DeSantis, who was moderating the panel, asked Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University whether it is necessary for children to wear masks. He replied that it is “developmentally inappropriate” and that it “does not help the spread of the disease.
Harvard professor Dr. Martin Kulldorff responded that “children should not wear face masks” because “they don’t need it for their own protection and they don’t need it to protect other people”.
In early May, Erin Pein, a New Jersey school nurse reported that she was suspended from her job after refusing to wear the mask and suggesting that its use on children is harmful.
The nurse explains in a YouTube video that at school she treated a first-grade girl who vomited only because she was nervous about wearing the mask.
