New study shows face masks are dangerous to children’s health

19 July 2021

It has been observed by notable people ranging from Thomas Jefferson to Winston Churchill, Pope John Paul II to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Harry S. Truman to Mahatma Gandhi, that we can judge a society or a nation by how it treats its weakest members.

In the last 18 months, the supposedly civilised nations of the world have systematically abandoned their moral duty to take care of children, the frail elderly, people living with disabilities, and the economically marginalised, all in the name of trying to stop the spread of a respiratory virus with an infection fatality rate on par with seasonal influenza.

The litany of abuses heaped on the weakest among us is gut-wrenching: nursing home residents in Canada were isolated from family members and abandoned by staff, and many died of neglect and starvation, people with learning disabilities in the UK were issued do not resuscitate orders, resulting in many needless deaths, and the poorest people in both rich Western countries and globally were pushed deeper into poverty and food insecurity.

But the harms inflicted on children – arguably the most vulnerable group in society – are so wide-ranging that they defy description, let alone comprehension.

Many children have been deprived of education for extended periods of time, with the least privileged suffering the most disruption, despite clear evidence that children are at low risk of becoming ill from SARS-CoV-2 infection, or of infecting others. Many children who were permitted to attend school were subjected to tortures such as those shown in these horrifying images:

Deprived of social contact and education, confined to their homes with stressed-out parents, and facing a bleak economic future, young people became more depressed and anxious than ever before, self-harm skyrocketed, and many took their own lives. Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Robert Redfield observed in July 2020 – a full year ago that in adolescents and young adults,

“We’re seeing, sadly, far greater suicides now than we are deaths from COVID. We’re seeing far greater deaths from drug overdose.”

Robert Redfield

Amongst these horrors, the imposition of face masks on children has been dismissed by many as a minor inconvenience, unworthy of comment. “It’s just a mask”, they say.

But research published in JAMA Pediatrics on June 30, 2021 clearly shows that forcing children to wear face masks poses an unacceptable risk to their health, resulting in concentrations of carbon dioxide in inhaled air that are well in excess of government guidelines for indoor air quality.

The researchers recruited 45 children aged 6-17 years, and measured the carbon dioxide content in air the children inhaled while they were unmasked, and then after wearing two different types of nose and mouth coverings – a surgical mask, and a filtering facepiece 2 (FFP2) mask – for just 3 minutes.

Outdoor air contains 0.04% carbon dioxide by volume. The German Federal Environmental Office considers that concentrations of indoor air carbon dioxide below 0.1% are harmless, concentrations between 0.1% and 0.2% ppm are elevated, and concentrations above 0.2% are an unacceptable health hazard, resulting in hypercapnia (excess carbon dioxide build-up in the bloodsteam).

While breathing through either type of mask – the more loose-fitting surgical mask, and the tighter-fitting FFP2 mask – the average level of carbon dioxide in the air inhaled by the children exceeded the upper limit set by the German Federal Environmental Office by a factor of 6.

That is, the amount of carbon dioxide inhaled by children who are forced to wear masks for only 3 minutes is so high that it is clearly in breach of occupational health and safety guidelines. And as the study’s authors pointed out,

“Children under normal conditions in schools wear such masks for a mean of 270 (interquartile range, 120-390) minutes.”

The youngest children were the worst affected, with one 7 year old child’s carbon dioxide level measured at a whopping 2.5% – more than 12.5 times above the level considered unacceptable by the German Federal Environmental Office.

But even the child who had the lowest concentration of inhaled carbon dioxide while wearing a mask, a 15 year old, exceeded the unacceptable limit by a factor of 3. And the oldest participant, a 17 year old, had an inhaled air carbon dioxide concentration of 1.3 – 6.5 times higher than the level considered to constitute a health hazard:

Since 17 year olds are effectively physiologically adults, there is no reason to think that adults would not be inhaling unsafe levels of carbon dioxide while wearing masks.

Update

The above-cited article was retracted by JAMA Pediatrics just after this post was written. The retraction notice states that

“Following publication, numerous scientific issues were raised regarding the study methodology, including concerns about the applicability of the device used for assessment of carbon dioxide levels in this study setting, and whether the measurements obtained accurately represented carbon dioxide content in inhaled air, as well as issues related to the validity of the study conclusions. In their invited responses to these and other concerns, the authors did not provide sufficiently convincing evidence to resolve these issues, as determined by editorial evaluation and additional scientific review.”

However, there is already a substantial body of evidence pointing to the same conclusions drawn by the now-retracted study, which is why occupational health and safety legislation has – until the COVID-19 debacle of the past 18 months – placed strict limits on the wearing of face masks in workplaces, as discussed by the two government-trained and accredited mask experts below:

Masks don’t work

Prior to the appearance of COVID-19, it was widely acknowledged that masks were ineffective at preventing transmission of respiratory viruses such as influenza and SARS-CoV-2, and that cloth masks may increase the risk of infection. As retired physics professor Denis Rancourt has pointed out,

“The relevant known physics and biology… are such that masks and respirators should not work. It would be a paradox if masks and respirators worked, given what we know about viral respiratory diseases: The main transmission path is long-residence-time aerosol particles (< 2.5 μm), which are too fine to be blocked, and the minimum-infective dose is smaller than one aerosol particle.”

Masks Don’t Work: A Review of Science Relevant to COVID-19 Social Policy

Masks are harmful

Furthermore, mask-wearing is harmful to children’s emotional and social development, impedes the language development and learning of babies and young children, and is intolerable to many people with autism.

A recent survey of German parents of school children found that 68% reported impairments to their children’s functioning caused by mask-wearing, including irritability (60%), headache (53%), difficulty concentrating (50%), less happiness (49%), reluctance to go to school/kindergarten (44%), malaise (42%), impaired learning (38%) and drowsiness or fatigue (37%).

A recently-published review documents a host of harms inflicted on every system of the human body, including the skin, nervous system and respiratory system, as well as multiple forms of psychological harm.

Masks are child abuse

In short, masking children is nothing short of child abuse. So-called health officials, politicians, educators, healthcare providers and private businesses (including airlines) who have put in place policies that mandate mask-wearing for children should be prosecuted for their crimes against the most vulnerable among us.

And parents and guardians of children urgently need to ‘grow a pair’ and stand up to the bullies who are degrading the moral fabric of our society by attacking the physical and psychological health of our children.

While you’re at it, stand up for your own right to breathe the air on which human life depends. If your employer makes you wear a mask, you should demand that they bring a workplace health and safety officer on site to measure inhaled carbon dioxide levels in mask-wearing staff.

Each State health department website also lists valid exemptions to mask-wearing, and privacy legislation protects your right to not disclose physical or mental conditions that make wearing a mask hazardous to your health.

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