Now that older Americans have the choice to protect themselves, it is deeply unfair to subject children to restrictions that no longer apply to adults.
Now that older Americans have the choice to protect themselves, it is deeply unfair to subject children to restrictions that no longer apply to adults.
L ast week, the CDC issued long-overdue guidance finally acknowledging that vaccinated people do not have to wear masks, inside or outside. Because the United States is not going to adopt a vaccine-passport system, there is no way of telling apart adults who have been vaccinated from those who have not been. In practice, this means that in localities that adopt CDC guidance, all adults can go maskless if they want. “More than calling it an honor system, I might say people are responsible for their own health,” Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, told PBS.
Walensky’s statement was an acknowledgement that the pandemic as we have known it is over. That is, ever since March 2020, individuals were being asked to not only think of their own health, but to consider the fact that their own behavior could lead them to unwittingly spread the virus to others who were more vulnerable. But now, all adults have been eligible to get vaccinated for a month, and appointments are easy to come by. If people refuse to get vaccinated, it shouldn’t inhibit the behavior of those who have taken the shot. Walensky, in a White House press briefing, stated what many of us have been shouting for months: “The science demonstrates that if you are fully vaccinated, you are protected.”
Despite taking this step, however, the CDC guidance leaves out one important group: children. Right now, the vaccine is available only to Americans twelve and over. That means that those under twelve do not even have the option to get vaccinated and thus are still subject to unnecessary masking rules. According to Anthony Fauci, “The children do [have to wear masks] when they’re out there playing with their friends, particularly in an indoor situation.” Current CDC guidance requires children in summer camps to wear masks outdoors, where transmission has always been rare to non-existent, even though heat and humidity could make mask-wearing uncomfortable or potentially dangerous. At a White House press briefing, Fauci said the vaccines wouldn’t be available for those under twelve until “the end of this calendar year and the first quarter of 2022.” Adding time to allow for administration of the vaccines, under the Fauci plan, children could have to wait another year until they can shed the masks. This is cruel.
If the CDC has already accepted the fact that unvaccinated adults may go out and about without masks, then there is no justification for making children wear masks. Based on the low transmission rates of the coronavirus among children, an unvaccinated adult without a mask is more likely to spread the coronavirus than an unvaccinated child. Yet because unvaccinated adults are impossible to distinguish from vaccinated adults, they are in effect not required to wear masks under CDC guidelines. Put another way, children are being treated differently by the CDC not because they are more likely to spread disease, but merely because they are more easily identifiable than unvaccinated adults.
Earlier in the pandemic, the argument in favor of having children wear masks was that even if they don’t typically get severe COVID-19, children could spread the virus to somebody older who could get seriously ill. But again, by the logic of the CDC announcement, that argument no longer applies. Remember, the CDC guidance is based on the idea that “if you are fully vaccinated, you are protected” and that “people are responsible for their own health.” So if any adults are worked up about the prospect of bands of unvaccinated and maskless kindergartners running wild, they have the option to take the shot.
Once we eliminate the societal component from the risk equation, we are left with only the question of whether the COVID-19 risk to children is great enough to justify continued masking. There is no universe in which this is true.
Children are extremely unlikely to get seriously ill from this disease, let alone die. Over the course of the entire pandemic, there have been only 287 COVID-19 deaths among those 17 and under in the U.S., out of a population of 56 million. That’s one death out of every 200,000 children. That qualifies as a mild flu season. Specifically, between the 2012 and 2020 flu seasons, the median number of deaths for ages 17 and under was 456, according to an analysis of CDC data. The number of COVID-19 deaths was lower than flu deaths in five of those eight years. This, even though the COVID-19 number counts all deaths since the start of the pandemic last March, while the flu numbers apply only to each flu season and thus cover shorter periods.
At no point in those previous years were children required to wear masks at school, let alone at outdoor summer camps while doing heavy exercise in extreme heat. There is no reason to require them to do so now.
Children have been the heroes of the pandemic. There is not one group that has given up more relative to the risk the disease poses to them. Their sacrifices were all justified under the theory that such measures were necessary to protect the more vulnerable. Now that older Americans have the choice to protect themselves, it is deeply unfair to subject children to restrictions that no longer apply to adults.