From the beginning of the pandemic, it has been understood that children are the lowest risk demographic, by orders of magnitude, but yet they continue to face punitive restrictions to their education and ability to socialize.

We have three effective vaccines that are available to anyone over the age of 12, and it is time for children in the US to have the same privileges as their EU/UK counterparts by being able to attend school without overly cautious interventions that have not been subjected to rigorous scientific analyses in this population, and do not take trade-offs into consideration.

Several mask studies that are considered 'gold standard' suffer from extreme bias - the Bangladesh study did not include children in classrooms, and ultimately concluded that cloth masks (which are the primary mask worn by children) are not effective in a community setting.

The Duke study, which concluded that classroom spread was low due to widespread masking, did not contain a control group, and strategically ignored countries and US states/localities where children did not wear masks and classroom spread was also quite low.

Several other studies have concluded that community masking is effective when masks are "tight fitting" and consistently worn, however, we do not have evidence that children are capable of adhering to proper mask hygiene protocols for close to 8 hours per day in order to render this intervention even remotely effective when weighed against the cost to their physical comfort and ability to freely socialize.