to it as prison. they eve come to really hate school and the mitigations are part of that. i m open to the argument that that is a fact feis we have to make. there are people who are still immunocompromised, still people who have vulnerable family members. what i m not open to is people saying there are no harms. i think the harms of masking are harder to document than vaccine transmission because you can t psychological problems rarely have a single causal factor. there are studies out there about masks hindering people s ability to, say, recognize emotions. i think finally we ve seen a lot of research and experts coming out that cloth masks in the age of omicron do very little. leana wen said they are basically facial decorations. it s not going to look much different in terms of risk factor if people in cloth masks take them off and people who
first. kids are at the lowest risk of serious health outcomes from covid of any group in our society. they also have the most harms from perpetual masking. kids are in school six to eight hours a day, five days a week. and masks interfere with the quality of their education, with their social and emotional development. and we need to bring equity back into the equation. just in california alone we have a million english-language learners. having that child be masked and their teacher masked when they are trying to learn english is incredibly difficult. throughout the united states we have almost four million students who have some form of speech delay that they re trying to overcome. teaching those kids with masked teachers and students is like really tough. it is. and you know, look, as a mom of, again, two children under the age of 5, both of my kids sclasz been out in the classes have been out in the last month because another child
become super spreaders. kids have been their risk of covid is flu-like if they are unvaccinated and really minuscule if they are vaccinated. we have to continue to adjust these policies that we have to protect the population and move forward and realize that covid is here to stay, our children are well protected, their teachers are vaccinated and largely boosted. we ve got to recognize the whole child. they have social, emotional, developmental needs that are hindered by perpetual masking. it s really time to say it s okay, we have to let the kids go back to a normal childhood. michelle? so i m willing to admit that my own views on this have been influenced by seeing sort of how much harm i feel like this last year has done to my own kids. i have a 7-year-old daughter that calls going to school hell and a 9-year-old son who refers
scene. masking held on. the efficacy for masks, whatever it was pre omicron, is now quite a bit worse. so we can either decide that we are going to mask harder, put our kids in n95s that are larger and tighter and more uncomfortable and will have even greater harms for their educational environment or we can say this is the new reality. masks did not work that well to begin with. vaccines are really the name of the game here, and it s time. we re not getting rid of covid. our cloth masks do very, very little. surgical masks perhaps a little bit more. do we really want to go to n95s? i think that would take us in the wrong direction except for that less than 1% of our population that s highly vulnerable, really immunocompromised, on chemotherapy, has an organ transplant, that decision to protect those really vulnerable
rules right, social distancing worked, masking helps, other leaders have also gotten this rebalancing phase right in some ways. for example, backing policies that enable more people to live and work in a world where available vaccines make this virus rarely deadly for the people who get vaccinated and where the people who choose to skip vaccination will, as we go into year three, four and five live or die with the consequences. a lot of this boils down to adjusting as the facts adjust and not being tribal or partisan about at tagging, say, the cdc, attacking because you don t like them is stupid, but at the same time being tribal and always defending the cdc no matter what it does if it gets things wrong. it is a part of the government. if you feel like, ari, this is getting maybe very broad, high level, let me give you an