New York State mandated mask-wearing in school. Six students arrived at school in Islip without masks. They were directed to a separate room. Their parents showed up promptly and called the police. This is a story that is repeated, in various ways, in districts across the nation, as parents debate and fight over whether their children should follow public health guidelines.
This is the question: why don’t these parents object too vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, polio, smallpox, and other contagious diseases?
On Thursday morning, six Islip Middle School students came to school without masks. When staff asked them to put masks on, as required by current New York State health rules, the students refused. They were escorted to a room with a security guard when, according to the Suffolk County Police Department, a parent of one of the students called police, who arrived at 9:50 a.m…
Islip Superintendent Dennis O’Hara issued a statement about the incident: “The safety and well-being of our students and staff continues to be a top priority,” he said.
In a Facebook group called “Moms for Liberty—Suffolk County,” parents against school masks compared the district’s actions to “segregation.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Those very same students are required to wear clothes to school, so what is a mask but a piece of clothing? And, I will bet that those very same students got a large number of required vaccinations to get into that school in the first place. So, one more is not a new kind of mandate but an expansion of an existing one.
What is wrong with those people?
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Interestingly, districts in some places have actually made the mask part of the dress code specifically to circumvent state government bans on mask mandates.
Like the Tik Tokers who have sent in bogus “tips” to an “abortion whistelblower” site after the Texas abortion ban (effectively), this illustrates that it sometimes one has to get creative to navigate around the religious extremists and nitwits.
Another obvious response to the Texas abortion ban is to boycott Texas entirely. Don’t visit and don’t do business with Texas companies until they rescind the ban.
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I doubt that children object to wearing masks. Think Halloween. It’s fun to wear a mask.
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The idea is that the state would have to ban dress codes if a school district made wearing a mask part of the dress code, as some districts have done to circumvent a ban on mask mandates.
It remains to be seen if such a strategy will actually succeed in circumventing specific bans on mask mandates, but it is a creative attempt nonetheless.
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I agree with you wholeheartedly, but I don’t know if you realize how many children are unvaccinated for the standard illnesses and how easy it has been to obtain the waivers.? Just remember that we are now in the 2nd generation of anti-vaxers….those unvaccinated children from years ago are now parents and choosing not to vaccinate their own children. I expect that once eradicated illnesses will start to become more prevalent.
What is wrong with these people?….they are ignorant by definition!
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I think one also has to ask what is wrong with us for continuing to accommodate all the nonsense.
These people need to be told in no uncertain terms that if they don’t play by the perfectly legal rules, they won’t even get “segregated” rooms at school for their children. Their children will simply be sent home and the parents will have to find alternatives to public schools to educate their children.
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“These people” will promote the right wing agenda as long as the Koch network backs them.
Mass Politics Profs 4-21-2021, “Koch connections and sham grassroots…”
Mercedes Schneider labeled them “pre-fab grassroots”. (4-2-2021)
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These parents are suffering from Ron DeSantis syndrome, speaking of which: quote – “On Friday, NBC 6 Miami reported that 15 staffers and educators in the Miami-Dade County school system have died of COVID 19 — just in the past ten days.” These anti-masker parents don’t give a damn if their kids spread the virus to others in the school or in the community at large.
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The first day of school was August 23, just 11 days before that report. Unlikely that these people got Covid-19 from students in schools.
Also, were they vaccinated?
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Also, I think Miami-Dade schools require students and staff to wear masks.
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There is a mandate – in defiance of the Governor’s death wish no-mandate policy. Those people were in proximity of others.
So do your arithmetic on days in school if it validates your “yey – but” attitude – but STOP RATIONALIZING death and hospitalizations.
More people died within a few months of this crisis than 9/11. 20 years later we are memorializing and investigating 9/11. But a million covid deaths – “oh well…” “oh gee…” “well yeh but local control…” And, the Governor should be brought up on charges of negligence.
Handling these exposures and quarantines every day since we opened school (and thank goodness for rigid monitoring, seating charts, and restrictions for effective contact tracing) – I can deal with parents whose kids somehow contracted this and showed up at school asymptomatic.
It’s the Rationalizing and excuses of uninformed critics that is as bad as the gop rhetoric of “it’s not that bad” and “they probably won’t die or get that sick”
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These headlines are designed to stoke people’s fears. You may think that’s excusable because you think people should be more afraid. I won’t speak it that. I’m just saying that the suggestion that those 15 deaths were caused by unmasked students in school is almost certainly wrong.
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“won’t speak to that”
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To beat a dead horse – (yes, pun intended for the Governor who does just that) – – – – teachers report anywhere from a few days to weeks before the kids.
I’d guess at least a couple of these people were in the buildings and not hospitalized or wildly sick weeks in advance (some probably yes – but not all).
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“Unlikely that these people got Covid-19 from students in schools.”
“I’m just saying that the suggestion that those 15 deaths were caused by unmasked students in school is almost certainly wrong.”
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Your suggestion that unmasked students could not possibly spread COVID is almost certainly wrong.
The fact that people are arguing about whether it’s fine if only one child in a school might have to be hospitalized or if it’s okay because only one child in every 2 or 3 schools needs hospitalization is truly beyond my understanding.
When the virus is very prevalent, wear a mask. When it subsides, as it looked like what was happening in late spring, mask requirements can be reconsidered.
Take a look at how many kids are being hospitalized with COVID in certain southern states where there is a huge effort to cover up how many kids are being hospitalized with COVID.
If a child has special needs and the wearing of masks is a huge problem, then their specific issue should be examined and possibly they can go to a special school where no one is masked.
It would be good for schools to ask parents to decide whether their kid should attend a school where no one is masked or where everyone is masked, and see what the result is.
Anyone want to bet that the most disadvantaged kids’ families would want to be masked, while many privileged kids whose families would demand access to special treatments regardless of how at risk they are — and get it of course — would say “we are fine with unmasked.”
Maybe charters can serve those privileged entitled parents — and of course, themselves – by offering to teach all the unmasked children of privilege. Maybe those charters can promise parents special access to monoclonal antibodies with nurses and doctors standing by to serve the needs of the privileged whose kids refuse to be masked, but expect privileged medical treatment for themselves and their kids if they get sick.
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Miami-Dade and other Florida districts are defying Gov DeSantis
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Mandates in our state are county by county – and some being sued by the grandstanding attorney general. But – even the Archdiocese schools and ever-increasing segregated schools are beginning to require masks.
Maybe the guilt factor is beginning to seep in.
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It takes just one infected teacher to spread the virus to their coworkers. It doesn’t matter where they caught it.
If school started on August 23rd, teachers were probably at in services and setting up their rooms prior to that date.
We don’t know the details, but it’s a traumatic experience for the students whenever their teacher dies. Imagine their fear that they, too, might get sick and die or their family and friends might fall ill.
My sympathies to those teachers, their families, and all whose lives they touched.
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I imagine Flerp’s point here is that the 9/3 report on deaths among Miami-Dade school staff likely don’t directly relate to unmasked students– especially since they are enforcing masks for all (in defiance of DeSantis). Another article [from local channel 10] reported 10 deaths, and stated the 3 teachers and 7 bus drivers were mostly African-American and unvaccinated, and a plea was made regarding the low [30%] vaccination rate among A-A’s in Miami-Dade. Per the M-D teachers’ union, prox 85% of teachers have been vaccinated. That article BTW was suggesting it may be time for a vaccine mandate for all school staff, although neither union leader agreed.
My takeaway on these S FL stats is a little different. It underlines what we already know: covid transmission in FL is sky-high. As of 9/1 their ICU beds were 93% full, half of them with covid patients [compare to nationwide 77% ICU beds in use, 14% with covid patients]. They’re also experiencing significant oxygen shortages. I would add to that something we’ve learned from the CDC study on July’s large covid cluster [90% delta] in Provincetown: the transmissibility of delta is so high that it overrides vaccine immunity fairly easily—at least among indoor & outdoor mostly-unmasked crowds. CDC studied 469 of the over 900 infected, and found that 74% of them were fully vaccinated. The silver lining: only 7 of the 469 had to be hospitalized [3 unvaccinated, 4 vaccinated] and no one died. [Of course it’s possible up to 47 of them will get long-haul covid].
My conclusion: if you’re in a region with high community transmission, regardless of the % vaccinated, all must be masked indoors– and outdoors if you can’t distance. Even with plain old cloth masks, that 74% breakthrough figure could be reduced to 30%. We can guess from international stats that delta will peak and transit within a couple more months. Meanwhile it’s important not to let covid hog inpatient & ICU beds & med staff, as is happening in FL & a few other states, so that we can properly attend to other medical emergencies, avoid disrupting chemo schedules, etc.
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Well said. We have to understand the big picture.
And if those 1%ers we often speak about were properly taxed – imagine the amount of pro-active preparation we could do to be better prepared for any future pandemics.
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It has gotten so bad on Long Island that I automatically avoid anyone I come across that I don’t know very well who is from there. There is a cancer of social ignorance in that region, and now it’s affecting public health. My current municipality in NJ is crawling with folks who have moved here from Long Island or who still have ties there. I anticipate a lot of pushback when we start the school year this week. There is no reasoning with them.
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In a Facebook group called “Moms for Liberty—Suffolk County,” parents against school masks compared the district’s actions to “segregation.”
The group would be more aptly named “Moms for Viraliberty”
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Moms for Viraliberty”
Liberate the virus!
Free it from the mask!
Open up the iris!
Liberty’s our task!
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“Viralibertarian”
Viralibertarian:
“Freedom for the germ!”
Antisci contrarian:
“Also for the sperm!”
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Moms for Viraliberty(2)
Give it liberty!
Or give me death!
Set the virus free!
And go mask-less!
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Give it liberty or give me death. One of your best.
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There is a whole network of people…. talk show hosts etc. that is brainwashing parents to do this.
https://www.salon.com/2021/04/27/tucker-carlson-tells-his-fox-news-audience-to-call-the-police-if-they-see-children-wearing-masks/
Fox News requires their employees to be vaccinate and they have a mask mandate. Where is the outrage for that?
This is the result of these talk radio stirring up their base. Listening to this teacher makes me ill. What happened to her, I bet, can be directly connected to Carlson’s rant about making citizen’s arrests regarding masks. Where are the citizen’s arrests at the Fox News station?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/three-men-zip-ties-confront-arizona-principal-after-student-told-n1278504
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A mask won’t help in Tucker Carlson’s case.
Only Duck tape over his mouth would be sufficient.
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That is a frightening situation. Kudos to this excellent principal for keeping things low-key, & to local police for responding, & arresting the father [hopefully his henchmen too]. How sad that the father kept his young son at his side to witness three burly men (including his own father) with zipties threatening to “arrest” two diminutive females– his own principal and her assistant. Pure child abuse.
I wonder if, pre-covid– the fears of disease & economic collapse, & the bizarre politicization of pandemic mitigation protocols– this dad would have paid any attention whatsoever to what goes on in his son’s school.
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I thought the same thing and I doubt he would have been involved without the misinformation/media frenzy stirring up more fear, confusion and anger… during this “bizarre politicization of pandemic mitigation protocols.”
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Sad when parents take the “stupid” pill.
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Best comment this morning.
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It IS segregation. Segregation with a lower-case s; not Segregation as in legal and legislated acts of separating people by race (oh, wait, that would be systemic which means critical race theory is valid).
Yeh – segregate sick people and those willing to do harm to others or protecting those who might contract an illness from others.
You think these parents would be playing the same stupid game if the letter came home, “We have have a case of chicken pox and a case of mumps in the school.
“Mumps. Chicken Pox. Measles. But don’t worry, your kid may have been sitting next to them but s/he is vaccinated and at least wearing a mask” “Oh, what, s/he’s not vaccinated – and you called the cops on us because of your right to go unmasked…”
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Parents choose, right? Everyone chooses their individual approach to “public education” with no thought or consideration that there are other people in the school or the community and it all works magically where everyone gets exactly what they want in every situation and there are no trade offs of any kind.
It’s the entire premise of ed reform. How’s it working out for public school students in the real world?
Oh, well. No matter. It’s just PUBLIC school students who are affected and we’re phasing their schools out anyway. They must be sacrificed to reach our broader goal of “reinvention”.
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Exactly. A public school is a community of learners…..with routines, rules and where people need to act respectfully with one another and follow the rules.
It’s not a building where anyone can walk in and do whatever they wish – and be catered to – or else they threaten to take the law into their own hands.
If there is a mask mandate, parents either send their kids with masks or keep them home. End of story.
If a child is sick or contagious – they get sent home. That’s always been the case. Always.
End of story.
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When I heard DeSantis say that parents’ rights should take priority over public health, I knew he was an evil opportunist. The man cannot be that out of touch. He is amoral and ambitious. He is exploiting those that are foolish enough to believe him.
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I don’t understand the parents who prioritize their “freedom” over public health or their children’s health.
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I know this is an extremely unpopular thing to say here, but I will say it anyway, because it is true, and because nobody else will say it: Covid is not a very serious threat to children’s health. Many more children die from suicide every year than have died from Covid since the start of the pandemic, for just one example. I have always been far, far more concerned about the mental health of my children than I’ve been about the risk that they will become seriously ill from Covid.
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I really hear you, Flerp. I am reminded of the movie “Life is Beautiful.” It is a tremendous challenge to parents to protect our children from the sort of overwhelming fear and sense of doom in the air— imbibing it can not only lead to spiraling anxiety and depression, it can prevent our children from hanging onto balance, perspective, and developing the sort of anchored and positive confidence they need in order to deal with this upheaval of normality, with all its daily-shifting unknowns. I think your particular risk-analysis on covid in under-18’s will serve your particular child well– what we discuss here is national, systemic overview, not granular. The matter of masks in school can be understood by individual kids as simply a way to protect those few (perhaps one in every classroom) who either cannot be vaccinated for med reasons, or who live with immune-compromised family members.
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FLERP, again and again, we are not concerned about particular people, we are always concerned about the whole community. If a kid doesn’t wear a mask, he may infect other kids who then, in turn, can infect their parents, grand parents, teachers etc. You do not have such transferability of a suicide or mental illness. I really wish people would stop starting a sentence with “I am not concerned about my …” in connection with covid. As soon as you start a sentence like that, we know you are not thinking about the community, and certainly are not describing anything that applies to COVID.
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Mate, I was responding to Diane’s comment about how certain people don’t care about the health of their children.
If people stop sensationalizing and exaggerating the health risks to children, then I will stop pointing out that Covid poses extremely low health risks to healthy children.
As for “parents, grand parents, teachers etc,” they should get vaccinated.
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Tell that to the kids who are hospitalized and die. Sure, there aren’t a lot, but what about the kids (I have several students in this category) who develop Long Covid symptoms? How many kids have to deal with that before we DO something about it? I hope it’s not your child who deals with it.
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How about I go tell that to parents of kids who die from Covid, and you go around and tell the parents of kids who die from suicide, homicide, drowning, and a dozen other things that children are more likely to die from that at least their children didn’t die from Covid.
People are really incapable of understanding how age-stratified Covid risk is. Either that or they refuse to understand it because it threatens a narrative that suits their needs and desires.
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COVID is not about children, not about any particular group of people. It’s about the whole community. If a child doesn’t wear a mask, the danger is not that he infects a child who then may die, but that a maskless child potentially causes a whole community to get sick. It’s a mistake to try to break down the community to smaller subgroups of individuals when evaluating the effects of covid. Infection by covid is transitive: if little maskless Johnny infects little Joey, then Joey’s whole family is endangered. Mental illness doesn’t spread pose such a risk.
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Joey’s family should get vaccinated and have had more than half a year to do so.
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What Diane and everybody else have been saying is that one maskless child endangers the whole community. That the formulation of this basic fact is not always perfect is no cause to bring up unrelated issues like teenage suicide.
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Mate, I suggest you pay more attention to the comments here. People can speak for themselves, and plenty here, including in this thread, have suggested that children need to wear masks for their own protection from a deadly virus.
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Which is just the repetition of the same error: an individual needs to wear mask for the protection of others, not for protecting herself. Governors of some states, like TX , Fl or TN, know this well, but they stated their mask opt out policy as if it was for the protection of the wearer of the mask because that fit their framing of the issue as a matter of personal freedom. Luckily, they got caught.
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FLERP!,
This is about wearing a mask. Children’s mental health isn’t being affected because they have to go to school wearing masks.
Children’s mental health is being affected because too many people keep coming up with ridiculous reasons about how their own and their children’s freedom is being affected if any efforts to mitigate the spread of COVID are put in place.
Most parents also understand that the threat of COVID is not extremely high to their children, especially their vaccinated children 12 and over. Most parents care as much as you do about the mental health of their children.
But I don’t know many (except those like in this article) who are convinced that only by banning mandatory mask-wearing can our children’s mental health needs be addressed.
It is a false choice to say either students should be allowed to go unmasked or their mental health suffers.
But Ted Cruz sends his kids to a private school that requires masks while he opposes allowing public schools to require masking even if his own kids’ private school does.
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FLERP
4.8 million children have tested positive for Covid. You were concerned about Myocarditis from a vaccine. Hesitant to give your son a second dose. . But you seem to have little concern about the long term kidney damage that could be done to even asymptomatic children. As asymptomatic healthy young Athletes showed signs of Myocarditis.
Long term Covid Kidney damage is far more prevalent than heart damage.
It is a mask end of story. A child wears it or he can stay home.
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Joel, please stop trying to scare parents.
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I hear this over and over “don’t scare people with covid” then few minutes later the same person says “the covid vaccines are dangerous”, thereby promoting the dangers of vaccines which are like million times less dangerous than covid.
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I can’t control what you hear as you go through your day, Mate. I can only control what I write on this blog. Adults who want to protect themselves against Covid should get vaccinated. There is no better way to protect oneself, and it’s not remotely a close call.
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Vaccination is not just protecting yourself but about protecting the community, hence it needs to be mandated. Contrary to what you suggest, tt’s not up to the individual to decide whether he wants to be vaccinated. This is already the case with many other vaccines. If vaccination is safe for kids, they also need to be vaccinated—to protect everybody.
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My point was that adults who have not gotten vaccinated have made a choice not to do so, including the 15 unvaccinated Florida teachers who recently died after contracting Covid outside of school.
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Joel,
To me the most ridiculous thing is people who say they don’t want to take the vaccine but if they get sick, they demand access to monoclonal antibodies or ivermectin.
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FLERP!
Scare ! You are the one who was scared to give a second dose of MRNA vaccine to your son till more data came out , I am aware that your son did receive a second dose. . The data is out, you are 4 times more likely to have heart inflammation from contracting the disease even asymptomatically than by receiving a vaccine. Receiving the vaccine is associated with heart inflammation in roughly 2.7 /100k shots vs 11/100k.
Children wear the mask or stay home . KISS!
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Yes, Joel, I was concerned about having my son take a second dose so close to the first dose, given what the data from Israel was showing. My concerns were ridiculed here as stupid and “anti-science.” I assume you’re trying to mock those concerns now. Last week, the UK’s vaccine advisory board declined to recommend that healthy 12-15 year olds get vaccinated, largely because of the same concerns I had, the extremely low health risks that children face from Covid, and the lack of long-term data. But I suppose the scientists on the UK’s vaccine panel are stupid and anti-science, in your unimpeachable view.
For the record, I did go ahead and get my son’s second dose. I did it because it concluded it would cause too many administrative problems with vaccine requirements in NYC. I don’t feel great about how I reached my decision.
If you want to make the honest argument that children should wear masks to protect adults, then go ahead. But don’t try to scare parents by exaggerating Covid’s risk to children. Healthy children are at extremely low risk for serious illness or death from Covid.
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Here’s what the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends:
“updated guidance for the 2021-22 school year, the American Academy of Pediatrics strongly recommends in-person learning and urges all who are eligible to be vaccinated to protect against COVID-19.
“In addition to vaccinations, the AAP recommends a layered approach to make school safe for all students, teachers and staff in the guidance here. That includes a recommendation that everyone older than age 2 wear masks, regardless of vaccination status.
“AAP recommends universal masking because a significant portion of the student population is not yet eligible for vaccines, and masking is proven to reduce transmission of the virus and to protect those who are not vaccinated.”*
”
We need to prioritize getting children back into schools alongside their friends and their teachers — and we all play a role in making sure it happens safely,” said Sonja O’Leary, MD, FAAP, chair of the AAP Council on School Health. “”
https://www.aap.org/en/news-room/news-releases/aap/2021/american-academy-of-pediatrics-updates-recommendations-for-opening-schools-in-fall-2021/
Note the *and which I bolded above. According to the AAP, the purpose of masks in schools is not simply to prevent transmission (eg, from children to their families and community at large). It is also to protect the children themselves from the effects of covid19 — because, obviously, if you don’t get the virus, you won’t suffer from the effects of the disease.
And though some may believe those effects are of little or no concern in the case of children, the pediatric doctors in the AAP who wrote the above obviously do not share that belief.
That children are less likely than adults to get the virus and less likely to get seriously ill is simply not a valid argument against mask wearing.
Masks reduce spread of the virus and ANY reduction in transmission of the virus and reduction in sickness with the disease is beneficial to both individuals and the community and society at large.Such reduction is key in bringing the pandemic under control
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“That children are less likely than adults to get the virus and less likely to get seriously ill is simply not a valid argument against mask wearing.”
They’re not just “less likely” to get seriously ill. They’re dramatically less likely to get seriously ill than adults, even if adults are vaccinated. It’s absolutely valid to point that out when people exaggerate the risks to children, especially when they’re doing it to frighten people.
How that impacts mask policy is another matter. I know you like to treat guidance from U.S. health authorities like Moses’s tablets when they accord with your own attitude, but I would note that (to my knowledge at least), the U.S. is the only country in the world whose health authorities recommend that children as young as 2 years old wear masks. Is that because the entire rest of the globe is a bunch of anti-science morons? Or could it be that there is room for reasonable disagreement among educated people? Children 12 and younger don’t wear masks in school in the U.K. and in several other countries in Europe. Could there be room for debate on the risk-reward calculus of mask-wearing in schools? Or is the U.K. just obviously wrong because the American Association of Pediatricians disagrees?
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One correction: The AAP is a professional association (like the American Medical Association or the American Bar Association) not a “health authority.” But the CDC recommends the same.
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Yet again and again, you, FLERP argue against the seriousness of COVID while argue for the dangers of the vaccine. Also, it is useless to bring up that kids get less sick from covid than adults since even mildly sick kids infect adults in their own and others’ families. One cannot single out groups of people and argue for their relative safety from the virus since they can still infect all others.
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FLERP! says: “If you want to make the honest argument that children should wear masks to protect adults, then go ahead.”
I hope everyone notices the false framing here.
The honest argument is that children should wear masks to stop the spread of COVID, period! Children should wear masks because everyone wearing masks inside crowded rooms is a scientifically proven way to decrease the spread of the disease, period.
Stopping the spread of COVID to adults also helps children. For someone who supposedly cares about the mental well-being of children, why is that so impossible to understand?
If you don’t fear for your child’s health when an unchecked pandemic exhausts all the resources in the medical system, then you must live in extreme privilege.
Children with any illnesses suffer during a pandemic and parents who care about their mental health are very short sighted if they believe that wearing a mask is more of a stress than living in a country where their parents can’t get them proper medical attention when they need medical help for any reason.
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FLERP!
7 million children between 12 and 17 received the vaccine’ Roughly 40 cases per million had heart inflammation (VAERS reporting). That is 280 or 1/25,000 vaccinated children.
Of the 5 million cases of Covid in children there have been 500 deaths discounting poor state reporting, that makes the likely hood of death from covid in children 1/10,000 cases. Of course how many deaths were attributed to Myocarditis due to the Vaccine, ZERO. How many hospitalizations due to vaccine related Myocarditis, very few for more than imaging and diagnostics. Bed rest and the avoidance of athletics for 6 months being the most widely prescribed treatment.
The Hospitalization rate of children is now at 2.3% of new hospitalizations and rising fast.
Now as for the Brits they are not exactly a stellar example of public health management. Their decision was not based on the minuscule threat of vaccination to 12- 17 year olds. It was likely based on the percentage of children already infected. Great Britain only exceeded in failure among wealthy nations by the US..
And for the record my married daughter lives in Oxford. It does take some adjustment for an American used to seeing a specialist for a broken finger nail to get used to the NHS.
What are the long term health effects of this novel virus. How much disease will show up decades from now?
If you want a list of viruses that cause debilitating disease years after the defeat of an initial infection start with polio. Like Covid most cases were asymptomatic or mild. That did not prevent long term effects on the nervous system for some that showed up 15- 40 years later.
The kids wear a mask till a vaccine is mandated or expel them, end story .
https://www.marchofdimes.org/news/after-effects-of-polio-can-harm-survivors-40-years-later.aspx
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Joel, as an aside, a scenario experts increasingly agree on is that eventually everyone will get Covid unless they die before they get it. Enjoy life, and good luck.
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According to data just released by the American Academy of Pediatrics, children now make up more than a quarter of weekly covid19 cases —which means they are potentially significant vectors for the virus, which in turn has obvious relevance with regard to mask wearing in schools ( to logical people, at any rate)*
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/07/health/us-coronavirus-tuesday/index.html
Then again, that is according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
And what would they know about a medical subject like covid?
After all (as we have been informed), they are little more than a “professional” organization (you know, just like the American Bar Association).
*It is not at all incidental (highly relevant, in fact) to the mask issue that the number of infected individuals and the severity of the disease for said individuals are two separate things.
What this means is that it is quite possible for a person to spread the virus to others without having a severe case themselves. In fact, people can spread the virus without even knowing they are infected.
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New York State has mandated mask-wearing and vaccinations for all people working in hospitals (and more).
Today, there was a demonstration in Riverhead, Long Island, New York, of hospital workers and their families protesting the vaccination requirement. They insist that the government has no right to tell them what they must inject into their bodies. I hope they all move to Florida or Texas, where vaccines don’t matter.
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Why would one expect an organization of 67,000 pediatric physicians (American Academy of Pediatrics) to know anything about infectious diseases and protecting the health of children and their families?
More to the point, why would one expect them to know any more than say, lawyers about the issue?
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All antivaxxers, Go to Texas!
Texas is the place you’d really love to be!
All antimaskers , Go to Texas!
The Commie states you really ought to flee!
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dianeravitch
“Today, there was a demonstration in Riverhead, Long Island, New York, of hospital workers and their families protesting the vaccination requirement.”
Did anyone ask them to produce pay stubs.
Given the propensity for AstroTurf demonstrations on the right. I would bet you had a majority in the crowd that were not hospital workers.
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These few loudmouths ready to defy pubsch and public health policy with personal threats against civil servants are mainly influenced by decades of legislators bad-mouthing public schools and their teachers [not to mention govt institutions in general]– triggered now by reckless media pundits encouraging them to funnel their fear and anger over covid/ economic fallout into a political witch hunt sold as a fight for individual rights. Our 30-yr adventure with pubsch fragmentation into two and three tiers of “choice” plays a role, though that’s a more subtle influence. I suspect there are few if any such disruptions at charter and voucher schools which have sensibly chosen virtual ed options & in-person masking. Parents there have little voice in how school is run, & the general public/ taxpayers seem to be clueless that they’re paying for those schools & what goes on there.
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This wouldn’t be happening with universal vouchers because everyone would just choose a set of edu-products from a list and design their own individual education.
It won’t be “public” in any sense at all, and it’s an absolute experiment that is wholly based on a particular economic ideology and none of these people have a clue that it will be “better” than public systems, but it’s full steam ahead anyway, because they’re “innovators” and very few of them either used or use public schools, so it’s risk free!
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People who don’t value public schools and believe “public” begins and ends at “publicly funded” are NEVER going to improve public schools.
They don’t value the thing itself and pitched it in the trash years ago. Turning to these people for policy advice or as consultants is a fool’s game. They’ll never improve your schools because they don’t believe your schools should exist.
It’s not a mystery why every single ed reform “innovation” involves diverting public school funding to contractors. They don’t believe in the fundamental purpose and mission of public schools. This is not a minor disagreement and cannot be papered over.
The ed reform ideology is inconsistent with public systems. They’ll all end up at universal vouchers because there’s no where else they CAN go. They won’t even be able to guarantee a universal SYSTEM. The one and only guarantee will be a low value voucher.
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Liberal states will have higher value vouchers and conservative states will have lower value vouchers, but ed reform ends at vouchers, because it can’t end anywhere else.
They’re already 3/4s of the way there. Every single ed reform “innovation” related to the pandemic is one or another variation on a voucher. It’s all they got.
I don’t even think they’ll be able to keep standardized testing. The private schools they’re all funding aren’t going to accept every ridiculous mandate they churn out like public schools have been forced to do. They’re already exempting the private schools they prefer from the mandates they impose on public schools. Why should public schools put up with it if publicly funded private schools don’t have to?
And there’s no check on it at all, because it’s an echo chamber and no one ever dissents. They get more and more anti-public school every cycle and there’s no discussion or debate at all- rubber stamped.
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Did you intend to have a last name on this comment? If not ask Diane to remove.
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I can edit the comment but not the name
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Maybe just delete the entire comment so the name isn’t there?
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Everyone should read within the ed reform echo chamber. 72 hours of reading what the echo chamber churns out and one realizes it’s entirely incompatible with “public education”
They just recently realized the “relational” aspects of public schools can’t be replicated without people. Arne Duncan went on CNN to deliver this amazing news- as it turns out they can’t replace public schools with a screen and some overpriced, overhyped ed tech junk because…. people have relationships with other people.
Duncan now wants a “master teacher” on a screen for the middle and lower classes and then aides will supervise “practice” somewhere else. This is so they can “scale” in their never-ending search for cheap gimmicks to replace public systems.
The funniest part to me is how the fancy private schools all of these people attended look NOTHING like the cheap junk they’re selling you.
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“cheap gimmicks” one after the next: exactly
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What did the police do when they arrived on the scene, with the “crime” still in progress? Did they:
– arrest school officials &/or teachers/staff? On what charges?
– tell the parent they couldn’t take any action because there was no crime (& if so, why didn’t they just say that over the phone & decline to appear)?
– instruct the parents to either see that their kids were masked in accordance with legal school policies, leave school grounds with their children, or be arrested for trespassing?
– arrest the parent who’d called them for wasting the police’s time by calling in a false report to harass law-abiding citizens — or at least warn the parent against such behavior in the future?
– sit down & have coffee with the parents & school personnel, & all talk about their feelings?
– or…?
I mean, what?
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Lenny,
Since the parents who called the police were violating a state public health mandate, I can’t imagine what police did when they arrived.
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I can imagine one thing that the police did when (or probably before) they arrived:
Donned their own masks.
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Lol, you don’t know many cops, so you.
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Theoretically, the police should have told them, politely but firmly, either to comply, leave with their kids, or face arrest. I’m wondering whether they did that or just shrugged it off & told the school administration it’s the school’s problem. Police in some communities may be reluctant to enforce mask mandates.
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I just wonder what they thought the police could/would do?
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a key point: WHAT
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Likely they expected the police to instruct the school administration to return the students to class, or face arrest for violating the students’ & parents’ Constitutional rights — an attempt to use the police as a blunt instrument to harass people who act to enforce legal rules the complainants don’t like, as if not liking a rule — or the political position of those enforcing it — confers a Constitutional right to be exempt from it.
This whole thing about anti-masking isn’t about any true health or freedom issue; it’s about, “If the ‘other side’ is for it, then I’m agi’n’ it!”
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“Education Next
EducationNext
“In Europe as in the U.S., without a strategy to deal with unions, governments seeking to reopen school for in-person education and to help students recover learning lost in the pandemic will find success elusive.”
Echo chamber working overtime to blame the disruptions in public schools on labor unions.
All of these “education researchers” will now pretend none of this disruption is happening, because it doesn’t fit their political narrative.
It’s obviously an inconvenient truth that two high profile “ed reform governors” in Texas and Florida are actively working to harm their own public schools, so the echo chamber will ignore it.
The political alliance trumps the education piece, as usual. The governors in Texas and Florida support charters and vouchers, so anything they do that harms public school students will be carefully ignored.
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Denmark appears to have it act together when it comes winning the COVID-19 battle. The leadership of the country will be lifting all restrictions concerning COVID-19 on 10 September. Please read the article at:
https://thehill.com/policy/international/569788-denmark-to-lift-all-covid-restrictions-in-september.
The people of Denmark were willing to buckle down and do what it takes to overcome COVID-19. The Danish people were willing to give up some freedoms in the battle against the virus. The Danish people and it leadership were willing to listen to the scientists so their country can overcome the virus and save lives.
This is almost completely opposite of what is happening in the United States. Freedom to so many of our leadership and the people this country is more important than the people who are getting sick and dying from COVID-19.
Frankly, I am ashamed of what is going on in the United States. The lack of truly caring about the next door neighbor is not longer an acceptable status in the United States. Other countries are winning the battle over COVID-19 but the United States seems incapable of doing the same.
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The weirdest thing of all is that many people actually seem to be using the pandemic as a pretense to complain about the government, liberals and everyone and everything else they believe is wrong about our society.
They would rather criticize and whine about every proposed remedy than look for and participate in solutions that would benefit everyone (including themselves).
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American impatience leads to more & more patients.
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I looked it up online and Islip Middle school has 670 students.
So the six students who refused to wear a mask represent less than 1% of the total.
Less than 1% of the students are needlessly increasing the covid risk for the remaining 99% (and their families) simply because their parents believe they have the “right” to do so.
And just a tiny fraction of the parents are causing a disturbance in the school by harassing the principal with unwarranted threats of citizens arrest and zip ties.
I hope the remaining parents are outraged by what is going on because they have every right to be.
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This article is quite vague.
It is possible that some of the 6 students were siblings.
This could be a total of 2 or 3 families who believe their own desires are always what should be served by government, but no one else’s should be.
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If you follow the logic of these anti-maskers & anti-vaxxers, we shouldn’t have any laws at all – everyone should be allowed to do whatever they want. No police forces. No army. No National Guard. No fire departments. We can drive on sidewalks or the wrong side of the road.
The fact is, we’ve developed laws and all these things through experience- because they help protect us as a society. We know we need to do things to protect not only ourselves, but others as well. These people want to abandon all responsibility toward fellow citizens- to such an extent that they are willing to put their own children at risk to prove their unthought-out demands. How will they react when, unfortunately, one of their own children contracts the virus and dies, as it seems is an inevitable possibility?
I don’t claim to be a religious person, but I do believe that Jesus was all about taking care of those less fortunate, and that there is a phrase about God taking care of those who take care of themselves (getting vaccinated and wearing masks is taking care of ourselves). It seems to me that these people, many of whom claim to be Christians, have simply forgotten or turned their backs on these tenets in order to further a political stance (put forth by politicians who don’t care about them).
What is wrong with these people?
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Schools and other public places (including privately owned public places like restaurants, hospitals, banquet facilities, and more) must abide by public health requirements like sanitary kitchens, refrigeration of foods, regularly cleaned restrooms, pest controls, ventilation regulations, avoidance of misuse of deadly chemicals, and vaccine requirements for employees and, in schools, of students too.
If we want to associate with others in congregant settings, we need rules to keep all of us as safe as possible. lt’s often the folks who complain the loudest against virtual education who also complain about masks and vaccines. They do not have a right to
risk everyone else’s life. They do not have a right to endanger medically fragile and medically sensitive children and adults in their midst.
When schools learn that one or more students are deathly allergic to peanuts, they ban peanuts and peanut butter for all students because that can save a life. Masks and COVID vaccines should be required for the same reason – to save lives. I wish every school would mandate them now for the same reason other vaccines are mandated for enrollment. It makes school safer not just for the vaccinated but for everyone around them -including the unborn siblings and extended families of all the students.
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Total idiots, comparing this to segregation.
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