Rep. O’Dea Calls On Gov. Lamont to End Statewide Mask Mandate in Schools

Last week, the governor said he expected the legislature would codify 11 executive orders, including a statewide school mask requirement, into law. Today, State Representative Tom O’Dea called on the governor to end the mask mandate citing published research that shows detrimental effects to children. The legislature has until February 15th to act prior to the expiration of the governor’s emergency powers.

“It’s difficult to understand how this administration, despite the looming deadline, continued to push ahead alone and now expects the legislature to codify nearly a dozen Executive Orders – all of which deserve careful, considered debate – within a few days of the start of session,” Rep. O’Dea said. “I am calling on Governor Lamont to end the statewide mask mandate in schools and for the legislature to hold public hearings on these important issues before they’re brought up for a vote.”

“As a legislator, I will not vote to continue enforcement of this ill-conceived mandate which, after exhaustive medical research and statistical analysis, has proved to be ineffective in preventing the spread of COVID. Numerous studies cite the detrimental mental and physical effects of the long-term masking of children. We cannot allow the governor to prolong this harmful mandate just to offer the illusion of fighting the spread of the virus among our least at-risk population – our children. It is imperative that we focus our efforts on ensuring that the decision to wear a mask in school is one made by the rightful consent of parents and families.”

Published data from studies conducted in both Europe and the United States prove that school mask requirements are ineffective and highlight the detrimental effects of their long-term use. The use of widely available and highly effective vaccines also helps prevent severe outcomes and allows those who are concerned, or have high-risk children, extra protection against COVID thus rendering the harmful mask mandates unnecessary. As legislators, parents, and community members, we must support the mental, emotional, and physical health of our children and let parents decide whether to mask their children. The risk to their development in such formative years, especially among elementary school students, is too great to play politics with harmful mask requirements.

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We should allow parents to decide whether their children should wear masks, particularly elementary school children.

A recent Danish study found no statistically significant difference between masking and not masking when it came to coronavirus infection. The study, published by the American College of Physicians in their “Annals of Internal Medicine” journal, is linked here: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/M20-6817

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control does not recommend masks for children in primary school and only recommends face masks for children over 12 years old in secondary schools situated in areas with community transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

Dr. Marty Makary, Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins, and Dr. H. Cody Meissner, Chief of Pediatric Infectious Disease at Tufts Children’s Hospital, state, “[t]he possible psychological harm of widespread masking is an even greater worry [for children than COVID]. Facial expressions are integral to human connection, particularly for young children, who are only learning how to signal fear, confusion, and happiness. Covering a child’s face mutes these nonverbal forms of communication and can result in robotic and emotionless interactions, anxiety and depression. Seeing people speak is a building block of phonetic development. It is especially important for children with disabilities such as hearing impairment.”

There have been numerous documented detrimental effects of long-term masking of children including anxiety, difficulty breathing, increased acne/skin problems, increased levels of carbon dioxide in the blood, depression, falling behind in reading and writing, and more.

Reputable epidemiologists and COVID-cautious leaning media agree COVID is of very limited danger to children.

“The biggest risk to your child’s health today almost certainly is not COVID. It’s more likely to be an activity that you have long decided is acceptable — like swimming, riding a bicycle or traveling in a car,” a NY Times author correctly states after he has compiled a thorough comparison of the leading causes of child deaths using data directly from the CDC. “Kids, COVID and Delta,” NYT. His results clearly indicate that the danger of COVID for children is much lower than other common illnesses such as flu or cardiovascular and common activities such as car transportation and swimming. See chart below.

Much of the data to date has been collected during the alpha variant and delta variant. However, recent studies show that the omicron variant has a significantly decreased severity over previous variants. See below.

Dr. Tracy Hoeg, whose research on the spread of COVID has been relied upon by the CDC for reopening schools, has stated that “data from Public Health England found that unvaccinated children are at a lower risk of hospitalization when compared with fully vaccinated 40–49-year-olds. And the delta variant, while more transmissible, does not appear to cause more severe disease in children or adults.” She has also indicated that “[w]e must put COVID-19’s pediatric mortality risk into context: according to U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) data for 5-14 year-olds, motor vehicle accidents and suicide are each responsible for 10 times and 7 times the number of deaths than from COVID, respectively. The 700 American children whose deaths have been attributed to COVID-19 since January 2020 is less than the number of youth influenza deaths in the 2017-18 and 2018-19 seasons combined.”

Dr. Martin Kulldorf, an epidemiologist, biostatistician, and professor at Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Professor at Stanford Medical School, have stated that “schools are major transmission points for influenza, but not for COVID. While children do get infected, their risk for COVID death is minuscule, lower than their already low risk of dying from the flu. Throughout the 2020 spring wave, Sweden kept daycare and schools open for all its 1.8 million children ages 1 to 15, with no masks, testing or social distancing. The result? Zero COVID deaths among children and a COVID risk to teachers lower than the average of other professions. In fall 2020, most European countries followed suit, with similar results.”

The release of widely available vaccines that are highly effective in preventing severe outcomes allows any adults and families that are concerned with high-risk children extra protection against COVID thus rendering the harmful policy of mask mandates unnecessary.

The most at-risk groups that have died from COVID (the elderly, ill, and overweight adults) now have the ability to get a free and abundantly available vaccine if they would like one, as does any adult or child that attends school. The CDC website states, “getting a COVID-19 vaccine will also help keep you from getting seriously ill even if you do get COVID-19.”

At this point, the availability of vaccines and boosters has brought down the risk of death from COVID, even for older adults, in line with the flu.

A recent New York Times article states: “A team of British researchers, led by Dr. Julia Hippisley-Cox at the University of Oxford, has conducted some of the most detailed research on COVID risks for different groups of people.” The BMJ, a peer-reviewed journal, published the work, and it is available in an online calculator. The research was done before Omicron emerged and covers only residents of Britain, but it is still instructive. See below chart estimating post-infection death rates for the vaccinated with certain comorbidities.

The article states, “one reassuring comparison is to a normal seasonal flu. The average death rate among Americans over age 65 who contract the flu has ranged between 1 in 75 and 1 in 160 in recent years, according to the C.D.C. Pre-Omicron versions of COVID … seem to present risks of a similar order of magnitude to vaccinated people as a typical flu. Some years, a flu infection may be more dangerous. With Omicron, ‘I think the risk is not super high for relatively healthy and boosted people in their 70s,’ [according to] Janet Baseman, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington…”

Dr. Martin Kulldorff and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya also point out, “the dissemination of vaccines that protect against hospitalizations and deaths upon COVID-19 infection throughout the older population in the United States has decoupled the growth in COVID-19 cases from COVID-19 mortality.” They go on to say, “Throughout last year, a rise in cases was inevitably accompanied by an increase in deaths with a two-to-three-week lag. However, during this most recent wave, there has been little rise in daily deaths to accompany the rise in cases because of the deployment of the vaccine in the vulnerable older population in the United States. The same is true in Sweden and the U.K., where vaccines have been provided to the entirety of the vulnerable elderly population and more. Because of the success of the American vaccination effort among the vulnerable elderly, COVID-19 cases and COVID-19 deaths are now effectively decoupled.”

Dr. Tracy Hoeg agrees that vaccine availability is a positive development for the most vulnerable adults and children. Given the rare children with comorbidities that may be at an increased risk from COVID now have access to effective vaccines that will protect them against severe outcomes, it is time to finally focus on what is best for all the children and allow them to have a rapid return to normalcy.

She states, “A study from England of the 3,105 childhood deaths during the first 12 months of the pandemic found that only 25 of those deaths were due to COVID-19 — equivalent to a COVID-19 mortality rate of two per million children. Of these, over 75% had co-morbidities and 60% had a life-limiting condition, meaning it is important to identify the children at highest risk, prioritize them for vaccination and understand what works best to protect them.”

Vaccines do not prevent transmission of COVID, everyone is going to contract it eventually and mandates do not account for natural immunity.

According to a Lancet study that collected data on the vaccinated and unvaccinated spread of the virus, the results show: “Vaccination reduces the risk of delta variant infection and accelerates viral clearance. Nonetheless, fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including fully vaccinated contacts.”

Dr. Martin Kulldorff and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya write, “Both vaccine-mediated immunity and natural immunity after recovery from COVID infection provide extensive protection against severe disease from subsequent SARS CoV-2 infection. There has never been a reason to presume that vaccine immunity provides a higher level of protection than natural immunity, and there is now evidence that natural immunity is stronger than vaccine immunity. Since vaccines arrived one year after the disease, there is also stronger evidence for long-lasting immunity from natural infection than from the vaccines.” They go on to point out, “an Israeli study of approximately 6.4 million individuals demonstrated that natural immunity provided excellent protection in preventing COVID-19 infection, morbidity, and mortality. Of the 187,549 unvaccinated persons with natural immunity in the study, only 894 (0.48%) were reinfected; 38 (0.02%) were hospitalized, (0.008%) were hospitalized with severe disease, and only one died, an individual over 80 years of age.”

In another Israeli study, the authors conclude “This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer-lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity.” In this particular study, the primary findings were that vaccinated individuals had 13.1 times higher risk of testing positive, 27 times higher risk of symptomatic disease, and ~8.1 times higher risk of COVID-related hospitalization than those with natural immunity. None of the patients in the study with natural immunity died due to COVID-related mortality.

Drs. Kulldorff and Bhattacharya concluded that “these findings of highly durable natural immunity should not be surprising, as they hold for SARS-CoV-1 and other respiratory viruses. According to a paper published in Nature in August 2020, 23 patients who had recovered from SARS-CoV-1 still possesses CD4 and CD8 T cells, 17 years after infection during the 2003 epidemic. A Nature paper from 2008 found that 32 people born in 1915 or earlier still retained some level of immunity against the 1918 flu strain— some 90 years later. In contrast to the concrete findings regarding the robust durability of natural immunity, it is yet unclear in the scientific literature how long-lasting vaccine-induced immunity will be. Notably, researchers have argued that they can best surmise the predicted durability of vaccine immunity by looking at the expected durability of natural immunity.”

Support the mental, emotional, and physical health of our children and let parents decide whether to mask their children.

The pandemic has created a mental crisis among children and adults worldwide. The mental strain on children is far more deadly and concerning than COVID in the state of CT. In two years, five children under the age of 19 have died in CT with COVID (not necessarily from COVID). However, the total number of suicides deaths in 2019 and 2020 in children under the age of 19 is 35.

According to the CDC, Suicide attempts among 12-17-year-olds, especially adolescent girls, during the COVID-19 pandemic has gotten worse the longer social distancing orders and government lockdowns persisted. Per CDC, from late July to late August 2020, the average weekly number of emergency department visits for suspected suicide attempts among 12 to 17-year-old girls increased by 26.2% from the same period a year prior.

In addition, the drug overdose death rate in 2019 was 1,214. We do not currently have the 2020 or 2021 overdose rate, but we do know it will be higher as overdoses around the country are higher over the last two years.

Based on the foregoing, we must allow parents to decide whether to mask their own children, particularly those in elementary schools.