A study published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) concludes that universal masking in schools not only reduces the spread of Covid-19 — a claim the study doesn’t exactly prove — but also helps thwart “structural racism.”
The study itself is fairly simple. On February 28, Massachusetts rescinded a statewide universal mask mandate for public schools. Of the 72 districts in the greater Boston area that kept reliable Covid-19 data, all but two, Boston and Chelsea, lifted their mask mandates in subsequent weeks. The researchers then compared weekly trends in Covid-19 incidence in the two groups of schools to determine whether mask mandates made any difference.
“Before the statewide masking policy was rescinded, the trends in the incidence of Covid-19 observed in the Boston and Chelsea districts were similar to the trends in school districts that later lifted masking requirements,” they write. “However, after the statewide masking policy was rescinded, the trends in the incidence of Covid-19 diverged, with a substantially higher incidence observed in school districts that lifted masking requirements than in school districts that sustained masking requirements.”
“Our results,” they claim, “support universal masking as an important strategy for reducing Covid-19 incidence in schools and loss of in-person school days.”
But do they? All the schools had at least as many Covid-19 cases before lifting their mandates as they did in June, when cases spiked again. Meanwhile, from March through May, there was very little difference in case rates between schools with mandates and schools without. Moreover, says the NEJM, while most schools rescinded their mask mandates, “masks were still encouraged in most school settings,” so it is possible that many students in those schools continued to mask up. On top of that, the researchers “did not have data regarding Covid-19 testing in individual school districts,” making it difficult to determine how comparable the schools’ case rates were.
Furthermore, as New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz observed, “It’s an ‘observational’ study — the kind the left dismissed as irrelevant when we’d point out that New Mexico and next-door Utah had very similar COVID trajectories despite very different masking policies. Or that Europe largely didn’t mask kids in school at all but had similar or lower rates than we did.” (Emphasis in original.)
There is little doubt that the NEJM researchers are committed leftists because their report is loaded with “woke” terminology. Indeed, they seem less concerned with proving (to the extent they can) that masks help cut Covid-19 case rates than they are with convincing people to mask up to end “structural racism.”
“We believe that universal masking may be especially useful for mitigating effects of structural racism in schools, including potential deepening of educational inequities,” they aver.
Just what are these supposed effects? For one thing, “Chronic underinvestment in combination with structural racism codified in state-sanctioned historical and contemporary policies and practices … eroded tax bases in some school districts and shaped the quality of public school infrastructure and associated environmental hazards.” This, in turn, “concentrated high-risk conditions … in low-income, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities.” (Only the ultra-woke use the term Latinx, which actual Latinos loathe.)
On top of that, pre-existing “educational inequities” exacerbated by Covid-19 “have been disproportionately borne by groups already made vulnerable by historical and contemporary systems of oppression, including structural racism and settler colonialism. Black, Latinx, and Indigenous children and adolescents are more likely to have had severe Covid-19, to have had a parent or caregiver die from Covid-19, and to be affected by worsening mental health and by educational disruptions than their White counterparts.”
Of course, as the Daily Caller pointed out, “these groups are more likely to have co-morbidities, especially obesity, which is strongly correlated with sickness generally. But mask-wearing doesn’t cure obesity. Nor does it make an obese person, white, black, or any other race, any less likely to get Covid. But the [NEJM] insists it does, by omitting these several key variables from its ‘study.’”
Does the study prove that mask mandates reduce Covid-19 rates? Does it prove that they rectify “structural racism”?
No. “What this study shows,” penned Markowicz, “is that much of the medical establishment continues to be intensely woke — and deeply dishonest because of it.”
