Experts from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, one of the top children’s hospitals in the United States, say that it’s time to relax masking requirements for kids:

“This is a moment to start beginning talking about removing the scaffolding and trying to reduce the restrictions that have been placed on kids because the risks, in terms of their mental health, in terms of continued learning loss, those types of things, were now far greater than the virus itself,” said Dr. David Rubin, director of the PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Translation: Kids are suffering – and have been suffering – because of mask requirements. That suffering now far outweighs any benefits of masking.

Pushback from the teacher’s union

But the hospital has faced opposition from the teacher’s union (to no one’s surprise). In fact, the teacher’s union just imposed stricter masking requirements on kids and staff, requiring they wear N95, KN95 or KF94 surgical masks. Cloth masks are no longer an option.

Following the science, eh? Here you have a doctor from a top children’s hospital telling the country – and teacher’s unions – that masking kids is detrimental to their mental health and learning abilities yet the unions respond with stricter mask policies. What world are we living in?

Blue states are unmasking

Even blue states are waking up to the fact that strict masking policies are falling out of a favor because maybe we are all just tired of living in fear, of having our kids falling behind in school, of true social interactions. It doesn’t hurt that election season is around the corner.

Even liberal New Jersey is lifting their mask mandates in schools! If that doesn’t tell you the higher ups are reading the tea leaves and seeing trouble, nothing does.

All signs point to the fact that we will need to figure out ways to live with the virus among us and thankfully, variants are becoming less deadly. Kids deserve normalcy. They have lived through enough uncertainty in the past two years to last a lifetime. And parents need that sense of normal as well.

But really, we need to follow the science, not the manufactured science that seeks control and power.