Kevin Kiley: “Throughout the COVID-19 era, the United States was an outlier in many ways, but perhaps most of all when it came to the…”

“Throughout the COVID-19 era, the United States was an outlier in many ways, but perhaps most of all when it came to the treatment of young children. A very clear example of that is the policy of forcing toddlers to wear masks. This is from an article from NPR in January 2022. It says: ``The United States is an outlier in recommending masks from the age of 2 years old. The World Health Organization does not recommend masks for children under age 5, while the European equivalent of the CDC doesn't recommend them for children under age 12.'' When it came to the Head Start program, not only was it recommended, but it was mandated that children as young as 2 years old, over a million kids in Head Start, had to wear masks up until January 2023. Now, this flew in the face of not only international norms, but of all scientific evidence. Study after study has shown no public health benefit to forcing young children to wear masks. For example, a 2022 study by Dr. Ambarish Chandra and Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg was titled, ``Lack of correlation between school mask mandates and pediatric COVID-19 cases. . . . `' At the same time, the evidence continues to pile up as to the harms done to young children when it comes to the disruption of holistic processing, of face perception, of social skills, of emotional development, not to mention the misery that they cause young children having to wear masks for hours on end each day.…”