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(LifeSiteNews) — After a Twitter user shared a Forbes story on the psychological damage done to children by forcing them to wear masks at school, the magazine deleted the article after the tweet went viral.
“Friends, please read this article by [Zak Ringelstein on Forbes], I’m just speechless that someone finally understands that masks on children are not benign,” the Twitter user’s post read.
The tweet had been shared more than 500 times in an hour before Forbes deleted the article.
The deleted article written by Ringelstein, a teacher and Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, opened by saying, “I have spent my career as an educator fighting standardized testing and the havoc it has wreaked on the mental health and well-being of American schoolchildren.”
Ringelstein goes on to talk about his primary goal as an educator was to remove standardized testing and develop a school system that is less “draconian” — an effort he believed would help mitigate harms done to the “psychology, health, and academic performance of America’s schoolchildren.”
“That was until Covid-19 reached America’s shores and overnight transformed the American public education system into something unrecognizable: a system of restrictions and mandates far more repressive than standardized testing ever was.”
“Students in most American classrooms now must wear a covering over their face and stay distanced from their peers the entire school day. In many schools, students are forced to play by themselves during recess. Even for the youngest of school children, desks are in rows. Kids can’t see each other’s smiles or learn critically important social and verbal skills,” he added.
Masks, which have been proven to be statistically ineffective in helping reduce the transmission of COVID-19, has led some governors such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis to ban mask mandates in schools statewide.
In response, President Joe Biden, in an August 23 announcement, instructed the U.S. Department of Education to pursue legal action against governors who do not require children to wear masks at school.
“The phrase I hear repeated over and over again to justify masks is: ‘kids are resilient,’” Ringelstein said.
“But as an elementary school educator and Ph.D. student at Columbia University trained in trauma-informed instruction, I am concerned that this statement is overly simplistic and misleading. What we should be saying is: ‘Masks and social distancing induce trauma and trauma at a young age is developmentally dangerous, especially for children who are experiencing trauma in other parts of their lives.’”
Citing a study conducted under the National Institute of Health researching the “role of stress and fear on the development of psychopathology,” Ringelstein wrote, “Stress and fear, in response to actual or possible threat, enhances the possibility of forming trauma-related memories.”
“Every year of a child’s early life lays the foundation for their adulthood and insecure foundations do, in fact, crumble,” he continued.
The now-deleted Forbes piece also included statistics from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which reports the mortality rate for children diagnosed with COVID-19 at “0.00-0.003%.”
In response, Ringelstein wrote, “Despite sensationalized clickbait news coverage,” a child is more likely to die from “a lightning strike” than COVID-19.
In his concluding paragraph, Ringelstein said “we must ask ourselves: do the benefits of masks and social distancing truly outweigh the long-term psychological, physical, social, and academic harm we are inflicting on a whole generation of American schoolchildren?”
Forbes, whose majority shareholder is a Chinese investment firm, has a history of deleting articles that expose the mainstream COVID-19 narrative, including a piece they published and deleted about the origins of the virus.
Forbes has yet to comment on the deletion of Ringelstein’s piece.