When will we face the truth about the mistakes made and the damage they wrought, especially to children, during COVID?
At a congressional hearing Tuesday, Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) asked Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra whether forcing 2-year-olds to mask during the pandemic saved any lives.
It’s an easy question because there is only one correct answer: Forcing 2-year-olds to mask at any time during the pandemic did not save any lives. Period.
Becerra could’ve added that it was an insane overreaction, not based on science whatsoever, and he is sorry on behalf of his health agency for pushing it.
Instead, Becerra pretended not to understand the question before trying to gaslight the congressman — and the rest of us — by saying, “Who did the forcing?” as if his department had no role in that.
Kiley was ready with a response, pointing out the Head Start program for small children, which HHS runs, enforced masking of toddlers until late last year, even outdoors.
Kiley asked Becerra to “point to any public-health benefit of that policy.”
Becerra stammered through the rest of his answer but never admitted the government made a grievous error.
The best he did was imply no one should be listening to HHS guidance. Noted.
The very next day, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) tried to give Becerra cover on his bungling answer by saying, “When we have a pandemic like COVID, 2-year-olds should’ve been required to wear masks. It’d be child abuse for parents NOT to do that.”
This, again, is a lie. Masking 2-year-olds did nothing but cause damage to these small children.
The Wall Street Journal reported last month, “In an analysis of nearly 2.5 million children younger than 5 years old, researchers at health-analytics company Truveta found that for each year of age, first-time speech delay diagnoses increased by an average of 1.6 times between 2018-19 and 2021-22.”
The Becerras and Nadlers damaged the development of children, they did it for absolutely no reason, and they refuse to admit their error even now.
In fact, while masking children was particularly egregious, there’s no evidence that having anyone mask, at any time, saved any lives.
A scientific review published in February by the respected Cochrane Library, “the leading database for systematic reviews in health care,” compared a variety of studies on masking to fight not only COVID-19 but a range of flu-like and respiratory illnesses.
The conclusion: Masks — yes, even N95s — provided “little to no difference” in contracting these viruses.
There are people still walking around masked and, worse, masking their children, who simply don’t know they were led to believe a lie.
To watch the HHS secretary and a far-left congressman continue to push a damaging health policy we all know didn’t work, even today, should be a wake-up call to everyone.
It’s the middle of 2023. The pandemic is in the rearview.
You don’t want to be reading about COVID. I don’t want to be writing about COVID.
But there’s no other way to interpret these comments than that those in power have not learned any lessons.
Should we face a new pandemic, we could easily be heading back to making the exact same mistakes we made the last go-round because people like these refuse to admit any error so they can protect their political team from the repercussions of that admission.
We can’t let this happen. Those who have been wrong the way these people have been wrong need to never have power over the rest of us again.
A lot of people made a lot of mistakes during the pandemic, but anyone defending toddler masking in June 2023 needs to be treated like the unserious person he is.
And while that should be the default for how we’ve always treated Nadler, Becerra continues to head one of our health agencies.
Hearings where he blatantly lies to us should lead to impeachment.
Republicans need to take Rep. Kiley’s lead and demand accountability.
Karol Markowicz is co-author of the new book “Stolen Youth.”