Madness! NYC Still Mandates Masks for Kids Under 5

CLAY: We were talking about the masking issue yesterday in New York City. They’ve done away with vaccines to get into bars, restaurants, gyms, movie theaters, all those things. They also have done away with kids having to wear masks in schools. And, by the way, most kids immediately stopped wearing masks because they don’t want to wear masks, and parents recognize now that masks make no impact.

But what’s crazy is they are still mandating masks for kids under the age of 5. Let me repeat that. So if you’re in kindergarten through twelfth grade now in New York City school, you don’t have to wear a mask. If you are a 2-, a 3-, a 4-year-old and you are in pre-K or you are in day care, you are still required to wear a mask in New York City. This makes absolutely no sense because younger kids are under even less risk.

It doesn’t make sense for a 16-year-old to be wearing a mask, but a 16-year-old is statistically far more in danger from covid even though it’s virtually zero danger than a 2-year-old is. So to the credit of the media member here, New York City mayor Eric Adams was asked about why that discrepancy existed. He said that it was necessary to keep New York from having to go back into a lockdown. I wish I was making this up.

BUCK: No, no, no! Clay, we’re not letting this go. We’re not letting it go. Here the new mayor is saying, “I’m with parents, I want the masks gone,” then says the masks don’t come off the kids. Don’t be an idiot. The mask… This is what we’re seeing. Masks are the least necessary for children, the least likely to work even if masks did work — which they don’t because of how children will actually interact with them day in and day out — and lockdowns, shutting down the city didn’t work.

So he’s saying we can’t stop doing this thing that doesn’t work in order to prevent doing another thing that we now know doesn’t work. Which I think now this is like the definition of covid mania, that and also, “Where’s Fauci?” I think he fell in the couch cushions. Someone should go look for him.

CLAY: The anti-science aspect here. If you are fine with kindergarten through twelfth graders not wearing masks, there is zero data to support that 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds need to wear masks — and then the idea that if they stop wearing masks that there’s going to be necessity of lockdowns? I give credit to Eric Adams because he’s been better than Bill de Blasio. Now, granted that is not a very high bar to reach.

But he does seem to be trying to get New York City back to normalcy and to have some semblance of an idea that the crime rate is a major issue and that New York as a tourist hub cannot return to normalcy as long as you’re requiring vaccine passports and masks. But there’s no reasonable basis, no data to support whatsoever the idea that 2-year-olds need to be wearing a mask in New York City and saying, “Hey, those kids understand that older kids don’t have to do things.”

Yeah. That makes sense when we talk about kids aging in the way we treat them — like, by the way, the bill in Florida which says kindergarteners should be talked to about sex-related issues different than seventh or eighth graders. It doesn’t make sense in masks.