New Systematic Review Finds No Data To Support Masking Children Against COVID

The latest research still doesn't support masking for kids, or even adults.

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A paper published in Archives of Disease in Childhood found that real-world effectiveness of child mask mandates to prevent COVID-19 transmission and infection has “not been demonstrated with high-quality evidence” and that “the current body of scientific data does not support masking children for protection against COVID-19.”

Researchers performed a systematic review and combed through 597 studies that were published up to February 2023. From those 597, 22 studies were included in the final analysis.

“There were no radomised controlled trials in children assessing the benefits of mask wearing to reduce SARS-CoV-2 infection or transmission. The six observational studies reporting an association between child masking and lower infection rate or antibody seropositivity had critical (n=5) or serious (n=1) risk of bias; all six were potentially confounded by important differences between masked and unmasked groups and two were shown to have non-significant results when reanalysed. Sixteen other observational studies found no association between mask wearing and infection or transmission. Real-world effectiveness of child mask mandates against SARS-CoV-2 transmission or infection has not been demonstrated with high-quality evidence.”

The importance of this study is that it examined the risks of bias among studies across the board. The higher the risk of bias in a study, the less trustworthy its results can be.

The authors of the study pointed out that the risk of bias in studies across the board was present and sometimes fairly high, but that in the best studies out there (least bias) no benefit was found for masking children.

“Specifically, of the 6 out of 22 observational studies that reported a significant negative correlation between masking and COVID-19 cases, five had critical and one had serious ROB. Of the 16 out of 22 studies failing to find a significant correlation, only 6.3% had critical ROB, while 62.5% had serious and 31.3% had moderate ROB.”

The authors also noted that observational studies have failed to find an association between mask wearing among adults in schools and lower odds of COVID-19, as well as general mask wearing for adults as well.

This new paper took the best research we have with regard to masking and determined what the science truly shows. A similar discovery, published early this year by the Cochrane review, gathered 276,000 participants in randomized clinical trials (RCTs) or cluster RCTs to determine whether community masking had any benefit in reducing flu-like or covid-like illness.

They were not able to conclude masking provided a benefit in reducing the spread of COVID-19.

It’s a shame that instead of proper inquiry, people were pointing fingers and shaming each-other at both ends of the spectrum. There are many crisis’ happening on our planet, but they seem to perpetuate in large part due to our division and our inability to come together and co-exist peacefully.

The Censorship Experience

Renowned medical professionals and scientists who have been censored and ridiculed since the beginning of the pandemic for simply sharing science have been spreading the word regarding this review. It’s another moment that illustrates the breakdown in science and public discourse.

In June 2021, I published an article diving into the current literature (at that time) on mask safety and efficacy, specifically a large meta analysis. By this time, Facebook had already removed at least 16 million pieces of content from its platform and added warnings to approximately 167 million others. YouTube had removed nearly 1 million videos related to, according to them, “dangerous or misleading COVID-19 medical information.”

The large meta analysis I reported on was published in the journal Environmental Research and Public Health and is titled, “Is a Mask That Covers the Mouth and Nose Free from Undesirable Side Effects in Everyday Use and Free of Potential Hazards?”

It looked at 65 studies pertaining to prolonged mask wearing to examine whether or not there may be any health consequences. In short, the study found that masks can lead to “relevant effects and consequences in many medical fields,” and also clearly outlined why the effectiveness of masks to stop the transmission of COVID-19 is highly questionable.

It was an eye opener for me. Although it was quite clear before COVID that masks were ineffective at stopping the transmission of viruses, I had no issue with people choosing to wear a mask. I thought they were completely harmless.

I wasn’t aware of the harmful physiological changes that can take place in the body due to prolonged mask wearing. This study points to the fact that wearing a mask is not an intervention that everyone should do because it's "‘harmless’.

This new 2023 review also highlighted the harms associated with masks, but more so developmental and emotional concerns in children.

In children, the harms associated with masking are often challenging to identify, measure and quantify with correlational studies, and many of these outcomes will take years to fully evaluate. […] These associated harms include negative impacts on speech, language and learning. Mask wearing causes reduced word identification and impedes the ability to teach and evaluate speech.There is a link between observation of the mouth and language processing, and people of all ages continue to focus on the mouth when listening to non-native speech.

[…] Mask wearing may also impact mental health and social-emotional well-being by limiting the ability to accurately interpret emotions, particularly in younger children. There is also evidence that masks hinder social-emotional learning and language/literacy development in young children.

Not long after I published my piece in June 2021, it was subjected to a “fact check” via third party Facebook fact-checker Lead Stories. When I clicked on the notification sent through our Facebook Page, it took me straight to an article published by Lead Stories. Their article claimed that masks are effective at stopping the spread of COVID. They claimed that my article was “missing context” and that the scientists who published the large meta analysis I reported on were wrong, and that they (Lead Stories) was right.

No further explanation was given. Lead Stories was objectively wrong to make the claims they did. And as Joe Martino pointed out in his piece How We Are Being Misled, leaving out all the uncertainty around mask effectiveness is how governments and the mainstream misled the public.

Fact checks cause the reach and performance of our social media channels to go dead. We have well over 5 million followers on our social media and yet can’t reach almost any of them due to “repeated fact checks.” We spent 15 years building a reputable, highly popular, successful business, only to have it shut down by fact checking nonsense.

Our Struggle For Support

Because of censorship, brand smearing and demonetization we experienced at Collective Evolution, The Pulse was birthed. We have since moved to Substack which for now is a censorship free platform.

Down from a team of 14 to just 2, we no longer have a profitable business, have uprooted our lives, and all of our work from the past 15 years has virtually been erased. For years people did not even believe us when we said censorship was occurring back in 2016, and today we’ve paid a huge price for that. But the good news is… people know to look out for it now.

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