Stop Masking Children

They Need To Interact With The Microbial World

Dr. Byram W. BridleMay 31

Throughout the declared COVID-19 pandemic I have been pleading for policy-makers and health care professionals to stop using children as shields in what is ultimately an adult battle over poorly practiced science.

I just learned that children are being forced to wear masks again on buses and in schools in many districts in the United States. This is due to the proverbial rise in ‘cases of COVID-19’ above an ‘acceptable threshold’. I’m not going to get into the fine details regarding misleading data about ‘cases’ that have resulted from misuse of otherwise elegant technologies such as the reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Using improperly calibrated RT-PCR testing has caused chronic overestimation of ‘cases’ of COVID-19 to a substantial but unknown degree. This drove excessive fear. Excessive fear caused our society to abuse children in the name of ‘medical science’.

Where I live in Canada, most places no longer require masking of young children (although some still do). However, I have been shocked to see how many children are still masked; even when outdoors with nobody else nearby; even when in vehicles with the windows closed. Having consulted with many parents about this, there seem to be three primary reasons:

1. Parents are still frightened that their children are at imminent risk of getting infected with SARS-CoV-2 and dying from COVID-19. Indeed, I have seen many unmasked parents who insist that their children wear a mask.
2. A lot of adults have been programmed to view children as asymptomatic super-spreaders that will kill elderly people.
3. Many parents are fine with children not wearing a mask but their child is now psychologically addicted to it; either due to fear (of dying or causing someone else to die) or it has become akin to a security blanket.

As a viral immunologist, I can tell you that children are at extremely low risk of dying from COVID-19. There are many other things that parents should be more concerned about. Also, there are lots of things you can do to make the risk even lower, including promoting exercise and a healthy bodyweight, eating nutritious foods, moderate exposure to sunshine to promote natural production of vitamin D, which the immune system needs for optimal functioning, etc.

More importantly, I want to make parents aware of two harmful aspects of masking children that I am in a position to comment on…

1. Isolating children from the microbial world promotes the development of chronic diseases.Young children need to interact with the microbial world. It is absolutely essential to the proper development of their immune systems. I am not going to delve into too many scientific details here because I wrote about this in an article that I published in The Conversation in March 2021. It is entitled “A year of COVID-19 lockdown is putting kids at risk of allergies, asthma and autoimmune diseases”. The French version can be found here.In a nutshell, we are born with naïve and immature immune systems. Our immune systems don’t fully mature until well into the teenage years, with most of that development occurring between birth and about six years of age.The ability of the immune system to self-regulate relies on interactions with the microbial world; especially via interactions with other people, particularly family members. This allows their immune system to learn to differentiate between things that are dangerous and those that are not. In turn, their immune system will become equipped to respond to dangers while preventing potentially harmful responses to things that pose no threat, such as self and inert environmental molecules and normal gut-resident bacteria, etc. Isolating a young child from non-dangerous microbes in their environment compromises the ‘immunoregulatory’ components of their immune system. A dysregulated immune system often manifests itself in the form of allergies, asthma, and autoimmune diseases. …

Full article:

https://viralimmunologist.substack.com/p/stop-masking-children?s=r