Action4Canada - April 17, 2022


Why Masks are Bad for Kids

Topics
masks for kids
Hosted by
Tanya Gaw
Mentioned
Trayvon Martin Matt Strauss
Rising Persecution of Pastors & Christians in Canada, Egregious Human Rights Violations & Live Q&A A4C Orientation April-13-2022 Website Orientation

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

146.44

Word count

726

Sentence count

39

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

As a strategy to control or minimize C.O.D.I.V. infections, masks are bad for kids. In fact, studies show that wearing a mask in public school can actually increase rates of absenteeism in the public school system.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 According to Global News, the Safe Schools Coalition, a grassroots organization consisting
00:00:13.140 of parents and educators in BC, are calling for the return of masks in the classrooms
00:00:18.680 now that the March break is over. The coalition argues that COVID cases will go up as a result
00:00:25.040 of the recent lifting of province-wide mask mandates and other restrictions, and this
00:00:30.320 is putting school-age children at risk. Coalition spokesperson Kayenton Martin stated that masks
00:00:36.560 really was our one true protection, and that's being removed. It would be interesting to see
00:00:42.800 if there is any scientific evidence to back up Ms. Martin's claims. After all, school kids have been
00:00:49.120 pulled in and out of school so often during the pandemic that it is difficult to determine whether
00:00:54.660 masks have had any protective effect at all. As a strategy to control or minimize COVID
00:01:01.140 infections, masks are bad for kids. Here's why. Recently, the Chief Medical Officer of Health for
00:01:08.820 Haldeman Norfolk in Ontario, Matt Strauss, explained why he was personally done with masking. He pointed
00:01:15.780 to a recent study that shows surgical masks reduce the risk of transmission and infection by only 11%
00:01:22.500 in adults under age 50. A somewhat greater protective effect was found for adults over 50,
00:01:28.900 but Strauss didn't say how much greater it is. If masks do such a poor job of protecting adults,
00:01:35.140 then how could they do any better at protecting children?
00:01:39.780 Here's some real-world evidence about mask efficacy brought out by someone who appears to be working
00:01:45.780 within the education system in Hamilton, Ontario. He notes that the Catholic schools ditched their
00:01:52.420 mask mandates while the public schools did not. As evidenced by the graph shown, there is no significant
00:01:59.700 difference in absenteeism rates between the two systems. In other words, masking did not substantially
00:02:05.860 improve absenteeism due to COVID or any other infectious disease. If anything, the graph shows that
00:02:12.740 rates of absenteeism are slightly worse in the public system where masks are widely mandated. Note
00:02:19.300 that this information wasn't gleaned from a scientist's opinion, but from simple real-world observation.
00:02:26.500 Masks hurt kids not just by inducing symptoms of depression and anxiety, but also by damaging their
00:02:32.980 ability to socialize and improve their social skills. Social skills are crucially important for a child's
00:02:39.060 ability to become a successful, self-managing, self-actualizing adult. Moreover, impaired language
00:02:46.420 acquisition can have serious consequences in later life, such as the inability to find and keep a job.
00:02:53.220 Here's what one mother had to say about the effects of masks on children where language acquisition is
00:02:58.260 concerned. There are numerous studies that confirm what the mother was saying. Masking impairs language 0.99
00:03:04.580 acquisition and makes the lives of hearing-impaired children needlessly difficult. The American
00:03:10.660 Institute for Economic Research cites numerous studies done by the CDC and others demonstrating
00:03:16.820 mask-related harms including long-lasting psychological consequences and impaired language acquisition.
00:03:23.300 And a German court recently ruled that masks cause serious psychological harm. Given all the evidence
00:03:30.180 against masks against masks, why are we still continuing to insist that children wear masks?
00:03:35.380 There are several reasons. Politics is one reason. The pandemic has been strongly politicized since day
00:03:42.340 one with some factions wanting to see a permanent continuation of mask mandates and other restrictions.
00:03:49.060 They want the restrictions to continue because they have something to gain, either money or power,
00:03:54.660 from keeping them in place, or their desires are driven by irrational fear, or they have a deep-seated need
00:04:01.860 to be right or to be seen as morally superior. Moreover, COVID masks are a form of political theater
00:04:09.700 that governments have used to show they are actually protecting people when they're really not.
00:04:15.060 They've even been used as a tool to encourage people to get vaccinated.
00:04:18.740 The unspoken proposition inherent in this is, want to do away with the masks, then get vaccinated, or else.
00:04:26.900 Another reason is that people want to keep the masks in place because they see masks as a security blanket
00:04:32.900 or magic talisman that will protect them from getting infected with COVID.
00:04:37.940 Finally, children are rarely severely affected by COVID. Most get a mild flu-like illness and fully recover.
00:04:45.300 It's time to drop the masks and let people and their children get on with their lives.
00:04:50.340 Action for Canada is actively working on your behalf to ensure that damaging mask mandates are permanently ended.