The Centers for Disease Control has no plans to change its guidance on children wearing masks in schools, according to leaked audio from a closed-door House Energy and Commerce committee briefing obtained by Reason.com.
“The CDC provides guidance,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said on the recording. “Our guidance currently is that masking should happen in all schools right now.”
In public, Walensky has been far more encouraging. She said at a press briefing that the agency was looking for “new metrics” in order to relax the mask guidance soon. But that relaxation would appear to apply to adults, not kids in schools.
The leaked audio included this exchange with Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.):
“What we see in the U.S. is an outlier as it relates to the mask mandate for our children to go to school,” said McMorris Rodgers. “[The World Health Organization and UNICEF] have both recommended against masking for kids under the age of five because it’s going to do more harm than good. For children ages 6 to 11, they think that we should be considering other factors like learning and social development. My question today, my one question, is Dr. Walensky, will you commit to update your guidance by Friday to allow children in person without the burden of masks?”
Walensky made no such commitment to a timetable for abolishing school mask mandates. She acknowledged the “limitations” of the Arizona study, as well as other studies the CDC has relied upon to inform their guidance, but rejected any near-term changes on masking in schools.
There’s a very good reason why the CDC is treading so lightly when it comes to masks in schools. The agency doesn’t want to cross the teachers’ unions, as they proved in Feb. 2021 when the agency was about to recommend that schools fully reopen.
The emails were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative watchdog group Americans for Public Trust and provided to The Post.
The documents show a flurry of activity between CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, her top advisors and union officials — with Biden brass being looped in at the White House — in the days before the highly-anticipated Feb. 12 announcement on school-reopening guidelines.
“Thank you again for Friday’s rich discussion about forthcoming CDC guidance and for your openness to the suggestions made by our president, Randi Weingarten, and the AFT,” wrote AFT senior director for health issues Kelly Trautner in a Feb 1 email — which described the union as the CDC’s “thought partner.”
Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) asked Walensky how she could justify the current guidance when the rest of the planet was advising against masking school kids.
“I will also say that guidance is just guidance, and all of these decisions, we’ve continued to say, have to be made at the local level,” she said. “As cases come down dramatically, we have deferred our guidance to the local jurisdictions.”
“That’s not acceptable,” said Palmer. Indeed, most of the masking holdouts in school districts are waiting for the CDC to change their guidance! Walensky is saying that it’s not the CDC’s fault that their guidance is being followed at the local level.
Walensky is not in a position to allow for any risk at all to be accepted by anyone. One death, one hospitalization, one positive test is too much. That’s always been her job, which is why the CDC guidance has never been about “following the science” and has always been about eliminating risks.
Taking off a kid’s mask in school is a risk. A very small risk to be sure, but a risk nonetheless. Since politicians and bureaucrats have anointed themselves arbiters of what’s safe and what isn’t safe, until they find the gonads to do what’s normal and right, our kids will be stuck in COVID hell — with their masks on.
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