Extended Mask Use to Blame for Unprecedented Childhood Viral Surge

For two years we have been told that we cannot question Science. And that is the biggest travesty of this pandemic and what has led to the most harms.

There was a downside to wearing (and forcing masks). It’s not even my personal opinion anymore. 

“The Science” has told me. And not just “The Science”. But the top doctor in Ontario. The doctor who solely made the decision to force masks on the entire population for two years. The health expert who not only suggested that kids be masked for 8 hours a day (even outside) but forced them to do so. 

When masks were first mandated in Ontario in August 2020, so many critics (myself included) questioned if it was appropriate. There were two major issues with imposing unprecedented mask mandates: 

1. We didn’t have any data or studies showing that extended and wide scale mask use would lessen the impact of a pandemic. 

2. We didn’t have any data or studies showing that extended and wide scale mask use would not cause any long term collateral damage to society. 

In September 2020, Public Health Ontario released a document titled “Wearing Masks in Public and COVID-19 - What We Know So Far”.

This is the document that every health expert relied on to make it illegal to go out in public without covering your face. This is the document that the media and most of society relied upon to ridicule anyone who challenged this assumption. This is the document that the government referred to when pushing part of society to the fringe and calling them derogatory names likes “anti-masker”, “anti-science” and selfish.

Here are some important lines from this document:

1. “No randomized trials have been published so far on mask use by the public during the COVID-19 pandemic”.

2. “No study has evaluated the impact of mask use on children’s education quality. Further studies are needed on optimal methods for optimizing mask use in children.”

3. “Masking to protect the wearer is unlikely to be effective in non-healthcare settings. Existing evidence demonstrates that wearing a mask within households after an illness begins is not effective at preventing secondary respiratory infections.”

4. “There are theoretical risks of harms from public mask use.”

But based on all these statements and assumptions the narrative stayed on the side of masks because the authors of this document concluded that:

5. “Public mask-wearing is LIKELY beneficial as source control”.

I believe that is the narrative that the media, health experts, and politicians chose because masks would instill the desired fear needed to convince society to listen to them.

The last statement I highlighted was one of the few statements in this document that was clearly an opinion. The other four statements I highlighted above are facts. But our fear-loving media and over-controlling government authorities went with the sliver of opinion.

For the next two years, anyone who questioned the prevailing narrative was outcasted and as we are learning now, completely silenced on social media. For two years, you couldn’t even post one of the exact quotes I shared today from Public Health Ontario on Facebook or Twitter without it being flagged and your account being shadowbanned.

When the authorities were still debating if kids were going to be mandated to wear masks all day at school or not, my children’s Parent-Teacher Committee proposed we use our accumulated fundraiser proceeds to purchase masks for every child in the school. Everyone was on board with this fantastic terrible idea. Because the media and social media portrayed masks as the correct virtue signal that society should embrace. Most parents embraced the idea of sticking a mask on their children for 8 hours a day without any thought of the potential ramifications.

I was an outcast when I challenged the idea of spending the school’s (and the children’s) money on covering their faces and essentially telling the authorities that we will blindly accept any asinine masking rule they choose to impose on our children without any reflection on long-term harms.

I would have been (and was) an outcast on any PTA or any social group in 2020. I probably still am. Not because I didn’t believe that masks couldn’t possibly help reduce the spread of COVID. But because I just wanted us to step back and have a conversation.

As with all other obviously useless health intervention (lockdowns, mandates, social distancing), I believe we need to think of not just the benefits. But also the costs. There were no debating the costs. We were supposed to just accept that COVID trumped all other public health concern. COVID trumped all other societal concern.

Now, after two years of masking up children, closing their schools and stopping almost every normal aspect of their developing childhood, we saw these numbers this past Fall.

By mid-November (week 45), pediatric hospitalizations in Canada were more than double what the historical average and triple what we saw last year (during the peak of the pandemic). These numbers have gone down since but they are still trending way higher than years past. And almost none of these pediatric hospitalizations are because of COVID. This chart (for Ontario only) from December 1st shows that only a tiny fraction of pediatric hospitalizations are COVID related. (chart produced by @Golden_Pup using Public Health Ontario Data).

So, while COVID may have hospitalized a couple dozen pediatric patients per week (across the entire country) in 2020-2021, our response has now caused an excess of over 100 children being hospitalized every single week.

Less than a year after it was okay to arrest people who didn’t agree to wear masks full time, Ontario’s supposed leading health expert went on the record to say he might have been wrong.

In his December 15th press conference, Dr. Moore said:

“It makes sense to him that pandemic public health measures such as masking are a factor in the record numbers of young children becoming seriously ill with respiratory viruses this year.”

“Partly because of that, Dr. Kieran Moore ruled out any new mask mandates in the province.”

“It was something we were dependent upon, but we are obviously seeing that there are some negative consequences to not being exposed to the normal respiratory pathogens over time,”

“We have more susceptible children that have not been exposed previously and that is causing this rise”

Again, in an unsurprising move by the mainstream media in Canada, this story was almost completely ignored. It was not featured on the 6 o’clock news. CTV, CP, Global News, and the Globe and Mail didn’t even touch it. Why? Because they were responsible for the hysteria of the last two years. They strongly spread the narrative that those who questioned mask use were to be hated and ridiculed.

I don’t claim to think that this argument is settled (if masks are useful or not). Further study may show that masks are useful. Forcing them may however always create more negative consequences. But regardless of who ends up being right on these debates, we need to let them happen. That is how “The Science” works.

For two years we have been told that we cannot question Science. And that is the biggest travesty of this pandemic and what has led to the most harms.

Those that wanted to weight the costs and benefits of any health intervention were told to simply shut up.

P. S. In my own case, I was called “anti-science” and “supporting the mass killing of elderly people” two years ago because I proposed the crazy idea of: Conducting a cost benefit analysis with respect to closing toboggan hills, ice rinks and every local business in my town. I’m still banned from most community social media groups because of this apparently crazy position (and my crazy position that we shouldn’t discriminate people locally based their personal health choice).