To expand on this, I just came across David Zweig's testimony to the HoR:
https://edlabor.house.gov/imo/media/doc/ZweigDavidTestimony092921.pdf
"The World Health Organization and UNICEF have repeatedly advised against masking children under age
6, and recommend masks on kids aged 6 to 11 only under certain circumstances. The European Centre
for Disease Prevention and Control does not recommend masks for primary students.7 Some European
countries have limited mask requirements for older students as well. Yet the CDC recommends that all
American children aged 2 and up wear masks in school.
To be clear: millions of children in Europe are not wearing masks in schools. Yet there is no evidence that
kids in Europe are at greater risk of severe illness or bad outcomes, or that their surrounding
communities are at greater risk than their counterparts in the U.S.
We should ask ourselves why so many nations in Europe and elsewhere have already settled this issue
from a policy perspective: They don’t make kids wear masks. So why do we?
Masks are not a benign intervention. They interfere with language acquisition, reading comprehension,
and socioemotional development. Quite simply, seeing faces is a fundamental part of how humans, and
especially children, connect and communicate with each other. Children are now entering their third
year of interrupted schooling. A child who was in kindergarten in 2020 is now in second grade, and has
yet to experience a normal full year of school. None of us know what the impact will be nor what it is like
as a child to wear a mask all day every day for years on end.
The claim that some kids “don’t mind” wearing masks may be true insofar as children have been
repeatedly told that masks are needed for their safety and that wearing them is a virtuous act. There is a
reason adults remove their masks when they need to communicate clearly, such as at press conferences
or in interviews, and we don’t wear masks at home. Whether masks are a necessary intervention on
children is a separate topic from whether they impose a burden. Let’s not pretend about the latter.
More broadly, to what end are we implementing these interventions in schools? COVID, as has been
known since the very beginning, thankfully poses very limited risk of severe disease to almost all
children. The CDC has estimated that up to fifty percent of pediatric COVID cases are asymptomatic.
More children die of the flu in many seasons than have died of COVID over a much longer time frame.
Two separate peer reviewed studies, published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, found that 40%
or more of pediatric COVID hospitalizations are for incidental cases, where a child was in the hospital
with COVID but not from COVID.89 While concerns about pediatric long COVID are real, multiple studies
with control arms have shown that the prevalence of symptoms of long COVID, many of which are vague
and common, such as headache and fatigue, are similar in children with and without a history of
COVID1011. This isn’t to say that COVID poses no risk to children, only that much of the public’s perception
of its risk to kids is considerably misaligned with its actual risk to them. Data from the UK shows that an
unvaccinated child is at lower risk than a vaccinated adult.12"