Kids mask rules a passive aggressive effort to get young vaccinated

The perverse primary school mask mandate shows the Andrews government is trying to coerce parents into vaccinating their children.

The Andrews government and its crack team of health bureaucrats have ignored the advice of leading infectious disease experts.

Daniel Andrews’ latest mask edict is possibly his most absurd and cruel. Mandating face masks for young children who are at the lowest risk from Covid-19 is perverse.

To do it in some passive aggressive effort to coerce the parents of young children to vaccinate them against Covid-19 is just the sort of underhanded, unscientific buffoonery we have come to expect from this government.

Children under 12 in NSW and Queensland do not have to be masked, students in high school do not have to be masked but Victorian kids as young as seven in grades three to six have to be masked for hours a day in the summer heat.

In coming to this decision, the Andrews government and its crack team of health bureaucrats have ignored the advice of leading infectious disease experts both in Australia and overseas.

The mask mandate for primary school students in grade three and above is perverse.

Among them is former deputy chief medical officer Nick Coatsworth who said last week: “When you drop restrictions the first ones you drop are the ones without any evidence base, and there’s no evidence base for masks in school. None at all.”

Dr Coatsworth also reassured parents that for healthy children influenza presents a greater risk than Covid-19.

“I’m in the process of vaccinating my kids but if you had to give me a choice between which one I would vaccinate them against I would, every time, I would be choosing influenza over a COVID-19 vaccine,” he said.

“That’s how I feel about the difference in severity between the two. That being said I will give both to my kids.”

The decision to vaccinate children under 12 should be left to parents and the family doctor, not bureaucrats and politicians.

In Sweden, the advice is against vaccinating healthy children under 12 against Covid-19 given they are at almost zero risk of death or serious complications.

“With the knowledge we have today, with a low risk for serious disease for kids, we don’t see any clear benefit with vaccinating them,” announced Swedish Health Agency official Britta Bjorkholm late last month.

It is worth remembering that Sweden never closed schools or forced children into masks and yet it did not see classrooms become super spreader sites.

Steve Templeton, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology, wrote late last year: “Primary schools remained open in 2020 in Sweden, with no masks, no deaths, and no adverse consequences for 1.8 million children. Teachers had an average risk of infection compared to other occupations.”

And, that was with the original strain, more virulent than Omicron.

We do not close schools or mask children during a bad flu season or force them to have regular flu vaccines so why are we doing all that, and more, for a virus that is less dangerous for them than influenza.