NEW YORK CITY (LifeSiteNews) — New York City parents have expressed frustration that Mayor Eric Adams has failed to end mask mandate for toddlers.
This week, New York mother Ana Jelenkovic openly condemned Adams for promising to end mask mandates for young children, but never following through.
“I find it all very dystopian and depressing that as a society and as a city we have come to just accept this policy,” Jelenkovic told the New York Post. Jelenkovic’s four-year-old now requires private speech therapy because of having to wear a mask.
Currently, children ages 2-5 must wear masks indoors in preschools, daycares, and other city-run programs. During past two months, Adams has often said that he wants to change this “within a week or so” while failing to offer a timetable for action.
“I want to remove masks and see our babies’ faces as quickly as possible. We are prepared, not panicked, as we move into the next phase of the pandemic,” the mayor said last Wednesday.
“My team of health experts and I continue to evaluate the data, day after day, and we will continue to communicate with New Yorkers with additional updates.”
READ: Dr. Robert Malone: Masks seem to make COVID worse
Danielle Pollack, a mother of a three-year-old girl, said, “It makes me question whether New York City is the right place to raise my family.”
“As a New York resident, I voted for Adams because his whole platform was that he would get things back to normal,” she added. “It’s just been really frustrating, because it seems like Mayor Adams is doing nothing about it, [and] won’t even give a timeline.”
In March, Adams promised parents the mandate would be lifted on April 4 but later cited a brief spike in Covid-19 cases to justify keeping the masks in place.
The mayor claims the main reason for mandating masks for children so young is that the experimental COVID-19 vaccine in is currently not available for children under five.
On April 1, a Staten Island judge attempted to free NYC toddlers of masks, but Adams countered this on the same day, announcing that City Hall would seek an appeal and request a stay to keep the infants masked.
Many parents are opposed to masking their little ones. A POLITICO-Harvard survey shows over 40% of parents hold that wearing a mask harms their child’s educational experience. Additionally, 46% think masks hurt their child’s social learning and interactions while 39% state masks harmed their child’s mental and emotional health.
Masks have been proven to be harmful for young children, in addition to adults. A German consumer organization discovered that “all FFP2 mask models that were tested were unsuitable for children and offered too much breathing resistance and not enough breathing comfort.”
A number of experts and studies in other countries had already suggested that wearing a mask is not only inefficient at slowing the spread of COVID-19 but could also have harmful effect on people’s physical and mental health. This is particularly true of children.
