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Rochelle WalenskyStefani Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images

(LifeSiteNews) — As the Biden administration prepares to roll out COVID-19 shots for children age 5-11 pending FDA approval, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Rochelle Walensky said children should still be required to wear masks at school.

Speaking at a White House COVID-19 briefing Wednesday, Walensky said the CDC “will look forward to scaling out pediatric vaccination” in the coming weeks, and schools should continue to enforce their mask mandates even after the FDA approves the shots for children.

“It will take some time, and as I just noted, as we head into these winter months we know we cannot be complacent,” Walensky said. “Right now, we are going to continue to recommend masks in all schools for all people in those schools and we will look forward to scaling out pediatric vaccination during this period of time.”

The CDC director argued that mandating masks for children — who face extremely low risk of contracting serious illness from COVID-19 — causes a significant reduction in the likelihood of a coronavirus school outbreak.

“We also know that from previous data that schools that have had masks in place were 3 1/2 times less likely to have school outbreaks requiring school closure,” Walensky said, citing a recent study out of Arizona comparing schools in Maricopa and Pima counties that required masks and those that did not.

The CDC analysis of the study concluded that “[t]he odds of a school-associated COVID-19 outbreak in schools with no mask requirement were 3.7 times higher than those in schools with an early mask requirement.”

It is unclear whether the study actually shows a causal relationship between mandates and a reduced risk of serious COVID-19 outbreaks.

Dr. Vinay Prasad, MD, MPH, a hematologist-oncologist and associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, argued that the Arizona study does not establish a causal relationship between mandated masking and a significant reduction in the spread of the coronavirus.

“The endpoint of the study were not cases attributable to school spread, but rather the number of schools with two or more cases,” Prasad said. “This weighs equally a school with four cases vs. 400 cases.”

Prasad also noted that there were “many important variables the paper did not adjust for,” such as testing rates, whether asymptomatic students were tested, what kind of masks were used, and overall compliance with the mandates.

“Strangely, the paper does not report the raw numbers of kids, teachers, and staff with covid19 infection thought attributable to school spread,” Prasad added, noting that the reported 3.5% increase in outbreaks in schools with no mask mandate “seems large, given that the cluster RCT [Randomized Controlled Trial] of Bangladesh showed no effect for cloth masks in primary analysis, and a modest effect size for surgical masks.”

Citing a likelihood of residual confounding factors, Prasad concluded the Arizona study “ is ill-suited for causal claims.”

As school districts across the country announce plans to require all eligible children to get the jab as a prerequisite to attend in-person classes, experts have raised the alarm about the alleged necessity and potential risks of vaccinating children, who face extremely low risk of serious harm from COVID-19.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which supports mass vaccination, “nearly 6.2 million children have tested positive for COVID-19 since the onset of the pandemic,” as of October 14.

The AAP counted at least 558 deaths attributed to COVID-19 among children, based on data from 49 states and Puerto Rico.

With an overall rate of infection for kids working out to “8,208 cases per 100,000 children in the population,” the AAP concluded that “[a]t this time, it appears that severe illness due to COVID-19 is uncommon among children.”

In an October 20 article for the Brownstone Institute, epidemiologist Dr. Paul Elias Alexander noted that the risk to children from COVID-19 is roughly even with their risk from the seasonal flu, arguing that vaccinating kids against the coronavirus is “absolutely reckless” and “dangerous.”

“Regulators: please slow down and demand safety testing, no matter how long it takes,” Alexander said, urging oversight bodies to perform “proper risk-benefit analyses and see that the injections are contraindicated in children.”

“Particular care is needed with regard to the potential widespread injection of children before there are any real data on the safety or effectiveness of these injections,” Alexander said.

Concern runs high that the risks of vaccination in children are higher than the risks from the virus itself, and that health problems will emerge over time once large numbers of children are injected with the experimental drug.

A September 20 safety report published by the Federal Institute for Vaccines and Biomedicines in Germany found that the number of reported cases of suspected adverse effects after COVID-19 vaccination in children age 12 to 17 has already exceeded the total number of COVID-related hospitalizations for children within the same age group since the beginning of the pandemic.

Studies published after the jabs were authorized for teenagers have shown that young people, especially teenage boys, are at serious risk of developing severe side effects to the experimental COVID-19 drugs, including heart inflammation.

In June, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna were forced to add a risk of heart inflammation to the fact sheets for their COVID-19 drugs after roughly 1,200 cases of heart inflammation following vaccination — mostly in males under age 30 — were reported to the government.

Likewise, a University of California-led study published in September found that for certain young men, the risk of heart inflammation after getting a COVID shot was four to six times as high as their risk of being hospitalized with COVID-19.

Meanwhile, although a briefing document on COVID-19 shots for 5–11-year-olds released to the CDC by Pfizer and BioNTech on Friday found “[n]o new safety problems” or “cases of heart inflammation,” NPR acknowledged that “only a few thousand children were included in the research, so that sort of rare problem wouldn’t necessarily be detected.”

As the Biden administration ramps up efforts to vaccinate young children, mainstream media outlets and prominent public health figures like Walensky and White House COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci have routinely ginned up anxiety about pediatric COVID cases.

The focus on increasing public worry about COVID-19 in children led recently to a gross overestimation of juvenile coronavirus hospitalizations by The New York Times.

Earlier this month, The New York Times said it “misstated the number of hospitalizations in U.S. children” after it ran a story claiming that 900,000 children had been hospitalized with the coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic.

“It is more than 63,000 from August 2020 to October 2021, not 900,000 since the beginning of the pandemic,” the paper admitted.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is set to consider approving COVID-19 injections for 5-11 year-olds on Tuesday.