A number of scientists point to research, however, that contradicts Walensky’s assertions. “What Rochelle Walensky said this morning is incorrect,” Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, told Yahoo News. “Children are not vectors.” Just as Walensky was testifying on Capitol Hill before the House Appropriations Committee (she was there to explain her agency’s proposed budget, but faced many pandemic-related questions), Gandhi co-wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post that described the risk of a child contracting the coronavirus from an infected person as .00007 percent. Outdoors, Gandhi and her co-authors found, the risk was a thousand times less than that, which is to say effectively nonexistent. “We have sacrificed children on the altar of our fear,” Dr. Gandhi told Yahoo News. She described sending the article she’d co-written to the parents of her children’s friends, only to receive no response. The implication, Dr. Gandhi figured, was that those parents wanted their kids — and hers — to stay masked.