“A year ago, I said, ‘Masks are not the end of the world; why not just wear a mask?’” Elissa Schechter-Perkins, the director of Emergency Medicine Infectious Disease Management at Boston Medical Center, told me. “But the world has changed, there are real downsides to masking children for this long, with no known end date, and without any clear upside.” She continued, “I’m not aware of any studies that show conclusively that kids wearing masks in schools has any effect on their own morbidity or mortality or on the hospitalization or death rate in the community around them.”

Schechter-Perkins is just one of a number of top experts calling for this type of discussion — and raising questions about the CDC’s recent recommendations and what has become accepted conventional knowledge. “We lack credible evidence for benefits of masking kids aged 2 to 5, despite what the American Academy of Pediatrics says,” Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School, wrote recently. While there are models, and simulations on mannequins with masks, “mechanistic studies are incapable of anticipating and tallying the effects that emerge when real people are asked to do real things in the real world,” Vinay Prasad of UCSF wrote in a critique of the CDC’s child masking recommendation. “The CDC cannot ‘follow the science’ because there is no relevant science.”…

“Mask-wearing among children is generally considered a low-risk mitigation strategy; however, the negatives are not zero, especially for young children,” said Lloyd Fisher, the president of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “It is important for children to see facial expressions of their peers and the adults around them in order to learn social cues and understand how to read emotions.” Some children with special needs, for example those with articulation delays, may be most affected, he suggested. Fisher stressed his opinions are not to be perceived as contradicting AAP’s stance for universal masking of students but said he wanted to discuss some of the potential harms and the importance of using evidence and data to drive decisions on when to eliminate mask usage.