Philadelphia Brings Back School Mask Mandate

Philadelphia officials will require masks again in public schools in January, claiming the move is “proactive” against winter viruses.

“In an effort to be proactive in supporting healthy environments and maintaining in-person learning following students and staff returning from winter break, the District will implement mandatory masking from January 3 through January 13, 2023,” school officials said Wednesday, as The Daily Mail reported.

The mandate in all Philadelphia K-12 public schools requires masks to be worn in all classrooms and hallways.

School officials cited the spread of COVID-19, the flu, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) – what some call the “tripledemic” – as the reason for the return of the mask mandate.

Twitter user and video editor Maze produced a montage of Biden chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci’s continued flip-slops on mask usage throughout the pandemic.

The decision in Philadelphia Public Schools was made following recent mask recommendations in New York City, Los Angeles, and the state of Washington, supposedly to protect against transmission of the spread of infection.

During a call with CNBC and other reporters earlier this month, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky recommended wearing a mask again.

Walensky said wearing a mask is one of several everyday precautions that people can take to reduce the spread of a respiratory virus during the holiday season.

“We also encourage you to wear a high-quality, well-fitting mask to prevent the spread of respiratory illnesses,” Walensky said.

According to the CNBC report, the CDC director said her agency is weighing an expansion of its COVID community levels system to now include other viruses such as the flu.

“One need not wait on CDC action in order to put a mask on,” Walensky said, however. “We would encourage all of those preventive measures — hand washing, staying home when you’re sick, masking, increased ventilation — during respiratory virus season, but especially in areas of high Covid-19 community levels.”

Nevertheless, as The Daily Mail reported, the new mask recommendations – and now a mask mandate in Philadelphia schools – “confirm many skeptics’ suspicions that measures brought in to fight the once-in-a-generation pandemic would be used again to combat seasonal bugs.”

In December 2021, epidemiologist and Brownstone Institute Fellow Dr. Paul Elias Alexander published a compilation of more than 170 comparative studies and articles on COVID “mask ineffectiveness and harms.”

“To date, the evidence has been stable and clear that masks do not work to control the virus and they can be harmful and especially to children,” Alexander wrote.

Earlier this month, Ian Miller, author of Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates, wrote at his Substack column, republished at the Brownstone Institute, that “not even N95 masks work to stop COVID.”

One “oft-repeated assertion” of “COVID-obsessed politicians and public health authorities,” he explained, is that “the failure of universal masking can be explained by the type of masks being used by the public.”

Miller recalled for his readers that both CDC and Fauci “explicitly claimed that wearing anything to cover your face would be effective at preventing transmission:

Fauci specifically said that “cloth coverings work,” not just surgical or N95s. Former Surgeon General Jerome Adams famously suggested that rolling up a t-shirt in front of your face would be effective protection.

Yet public health departments and the media are now highlighting the importance of “high quality,” “well-fitted” masks.

“Their desperation to justify masking has led to remarkably poor studies being released to support their anti-science messaging,” Miller wrote. “There is new research that has been released showing that masks are ineffective, regardless of type. And it’s not just new research, it’s high quality research.”

In one randomized controlled trial (RCT) study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in November, medical masks were compared to fit-tested N95 masks for ability to prevent COVID infection.

Subjects in the study were healthcare workers who would be most likely to use masks appropriately.

Researchers tracked the percentage of healthcare workers who tested positive for COVID in each group to determine whether higher-quality masking was effective in preventing infection.

“Unsurprisingly, the results confirmed that there is essentially zero difference between surgical or N95 respirators when it comes to tests results,” Miller concluded.

Industrial hygienist, safety professional, and engineer Stephen Petty, a forensic expert in the use of personal protective equipment (PPE), has devoted his “Petty Podcast” to the ineffectiveness of masks for COVID.

In the video above, published at The New American in July, Petty explained why neither surgical masks nor N95 respirators are effective in protecting people from COVID.

Additionally, Petty observed recent studies show masks increase one’s chances of getting infected, and, for children, masks are associated with delays in intellectual, social, and emotional development.

In a tweet from his Petty Podcast account in November, the expert also noted media are interviewing physicians who claim “masks will stop flu transmission,” though “RCTs [random controlled trials] show over and over this is not the case.”

“Has anyone ever seen an Industrial Hygienist interviewed on this topic?” Petty asked.

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Susan Berry, PhD, is national education editor at The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Teacher and Students Wearing Masks” by RODNAE Productions.