“Making children wear masks is a political and unscientific choice”

Samuel Fitoussi is a student, founder and writer of the satirical blog La Gazette de l'Étudiant.

There is something strange, unhealthy and somewhat immoral about seeing nightclubs open but six-year-olds in masks all day at school and subject to strict distancing rules. As the incidence rate increases and calls for tougher school measures are increasing, let us propose instead to stop sacrificing children.

First of all, it should be noted that if the health protocol at school is presented by its promoters as a scientific choice, it is in fact a matter of moral arbitration. Science cannot make a value judgment on how we should weigh the benefits of the mask in school (limiting viral circulation) against its costs (loss of well-being for 13 million children). Unfortunately, there are many who disguise their moral arbitration as scientific truth - an attitude harmful to democratic debate since it implies that opposition to health measures is always fueled by the rejection of science.

Remember that not everything is good for saving lives. Several thousand French people die on the road every year, a figure that we could considerably reduce by halving all speed limits. A measure that no one is proposing, since we believe that its benefits would be lower than its social costs. Likewise, we tolerate dozens of daily flu deaths every winter because we consider them to be collectively less damaging than the restrictions that would need to be put in place to avoid them.

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It is in the light of this reality that the merits of the health protocol must be assessed. For the moment, those who argue for its maintenance seem to do so independently of any cost-benefit consideration, its health benefits being almost never quantified and never weighed against its costs. From how many lives saved per year does it become acceptable to have 13 million children wear a mask all day? It is not illegitimate to consider that a normal year of schooling for an entire generation is worth 15,000 additional deaths. Faced with a virus doomed to become endemic, it is important to have a democratic debate and that doctors - unelected and sometimes subject to conflicts of interest (their workload being affected by the number hospital admissions) - do not have to decide on their own.

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The risk of Covid for children is extremely low. If the cost-benefit balance of vaccination of children under 12 is debated, it is not because the vaccine is dangerous but because the virus is perhaps even less so. According to the latest report from Public Health France, as of October 31, 2021, there were twelve deaths of minors attributable to Covid since the start of the pandemic. Only three of these children had no comorbidities. By way of comparison, 90 children die each year from various infectious and parasitic diseases (influenza, gastroenteritis, bronchiolitis, angina, etc.); diseases for which no one has ever called for "making schools safe", no doubt because they are not very dangerous for adults.

As for the danger of the long Covid, let us note that bronchiolitis, gastro and chickenpox also leave sequels that do not move anyone, and that it is amusing that those who claim to be terribly concerned about the health of children do not have the slightest thought for the long-term educational and psychological consequences of the restrictions we impose on them.

To avoid recognizing that we mask children to protect adults, all untruths are allowed. It will be affirmed at the appearance of each new variant - on the basis of simple testimonies and without any statistical study to support it - that it affects young people more. Moreover, we have no news of the hecatomb that the Delta variant was to cause in children.

Last week, on the set of the program C à Vous (France 5), Gilbert Deray - head of the nephrology department at Pitié-Salpêtrière - said that "the brain MRIs of children who have Covid look like Alzheimer's". Total fantasy – since refuted by many doctors – received with gravity on the set, in particular by Patrick Cohen, yet so quick to denounce (rightly) the lack of scientific rigor of Didier Raoult.

In the camp of La Science, noble lies – that is to say those which encourage respect for barrier gestures – seem acceptable. These approximations nevertheless pose a major democratic problem: the role of scientists and the media is to inform as best as possible because only a precise assessment of the risks incurred by each can make it possible to achieve the collectively optimal social arbitration. Some scientists have adopted a political approach, deliberately exaggerating certain risks and concealing certain truths (the concept of natural post-infection immunity has become curiously controversial) in order to push for arbitration that they judge subjectively optimal.

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We have therefore been forcing children to sacrifice themselves for a virus against which they are not at risk for two years. Today, can we continue to impose constraints on them to reduce the risk of adults who choose not to be vaccinated or who wish zero risk for them? And as long as the risk of hospital saturation is only hypothetical, can the reduction of hospital influx be a legitimate collective objective? The hospitals must be at the service of the French and not the French - and even less the children - at the service of the hospitals. After two years of pandemic, the selfish person is perhaps no longer the teenager who takes off his mask but the adult who wants to continue to impose it on him.

Rotting children's schooling seems to have become a way for the government not to bother adults too much and at the same time satisfy the restrictionists. The United Kingdom proves that grandstanding is not the only solution and that there is another way: the well-being of children as a public policy priority. There, children can see their teachers' faces again, have lunch with whomever they want, hug their friends, play sports in normal conditions and go to school without the feeling of guilt for being infectious agents harmful to the well-being. - be collective. While France chooses to be tough on six-year-olds, the UK chooses not to put them at risk of long-term neurological, social and emotional disruption.