The Better Government Association’s Fact-Check On Masking School Kids is Wrong And Irresponsible – Wirepoints

By: Mark Glennon*

The Better Government Association slapped a “mostly false” label on a recent claim by Illinois state Rep. Blaine Wilhour (R-Beecher City) about the ineffectiveness of school masks on kids.

But it’s the BGA’s fact-check that is riddled with distortions and falsehoods.

The BGA wasted no time with distortion, starting its article by saying, “Several states across the nation are announcing the end of mask mandates for most public places.”

“Several”? Forty-six states have no statewide mask mandate, and Illinois is one of only five states trying to keep a statewide school mask mandate in place.

BGA then went into the studies it claims support school masking, all of which come from a Centers for Disease Control webpage. That in itself should set off alarms. The CDC has been entirely discredited, most recently being exposed by the New York Times for withholding critical COVID data. We collected many of the other criticisms of CDC dishonesty and ineptitude just last week, from sources on both the right and the left.

Astonishingly, the first study cited by the BGA is entirely inapplicable and is among the most ridiculed. It’s from Georgia, and it’s not even about masking students. It was about masking staff and teachers. Worse, according to a report in New York Magazine, the study actually found that masking students had no effect, but the CDC didn’t report that, squelching the results. That amounted to “file drawering” the true results on student masking, said the report.

Another widely ridiculed study cited by the BGA is from Arizona, which the CDC said showed the efficacy of masks on school kids. But it was “profoundly misleading,” wrote The Atlantic, which was among many harsh critics of the study. “You can’t learn anything about the effects of school mask mandates from this study” says the column, quoting a public-health economist at Arizona State University.

The BGA says the CDC web page includes “observations conducted in cities throughout the U.S., including Chicago.” Whoa, hold on. The Chicago study cited by the CDC made no attempt to isolate the effects of student masking. It was about the cumulative effect of a collection of measures employed by Chicago Catholic schools, which the study concluded were enough to make in-person learning safe. Those measures included social distancing, hand hygiene, cleaning and disinfecting, daily self-reported or documented symptom monitoring, and extremely aggressive measures on testing, rapid notification and quarantine.

The same problem applies to other studies the BGA cited from the CDC web page. They were about the collective effect of a range of mitigation efforts and did not attempt to isolate the effects of masks.

Most importantly, not one study referenced by the CDC or BGA was done after the arrival of the omicron variant in December. Omicron changed everything about the value of masking because it is vastly more contagious and thereby defeats masking far more easily. Nor did the CDC or BGA make any effort to balance any supposed benefits of masking against the harm it does to children and their education, which was part of the case Wilhour made in his comments.

The BGA says there are no clinical studies on masking children. But there are on masking against COVID generally. The biggest and most widely cited was conducted in Bangladesh. It found zero effectiveness for cloth masks and an 11% reduction in community spread from surgical masks. But school kids almost universally use cloth masks.

All the BGA actually did was parrot back what the CDC says on its web page. That’s exactly what Illinois COVID advisor Emily Landon did last week when asked for the state’s science behind school masking. She referred to the very same webpage.

That’s crazy. Repeddling government propaganda is the last thing we should expect from fact-checkers, especially on a subject like COVID where the government has been inept and dishonest time and time again.

It’s particularly irresponsible to peddle bad information on healthcare. How many people have put too much faith in masks, thanks to exaggerated claims about their efficacy (such as the CDC director’s claim that masks are 80% effective, which has no basis whatsoever), and become infected as a result? We will probably never know but mask proponents should be asking.

The BGA set up this particular fact check by cherry picking one statement by Wilhour that should have been regarded as rhetoric not to be taken literally. There is “absolutely no observed or clinical data that indicates any benefit whatsoever to masking K-12 students in schools,” Wilhour said. But Wilhour in fact made a more complex case, sending the BGA the list of 150 studies challenging mask efficacy and discussing harm from masks. The BGA chose to ignore most of material and the whole of Wilhour’s views on masks, selecting instead one sentence that’s a straw man. School masking does still have supporters beyond the CDC, some of which the BGA properly cited. But the least the BGA should have done is acknowledge the controversy on the subject.

The BGA does its fact checking in partnership with a national outfit called PolitiFact. PolitiFact has been widely criticized for many years for its politicized, unfair fact-checks. We’ve written several columns about those that pertain to Illinois, some of which are linked below.

The BGA often does valuable work that we link to routinely and have often complimented here. But they should dump their affiliation with PolitiFact and clean up their fact-checking.

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints

Further reading from Wirepoints and others on this subject:

• The Mask Is Off: Illinois Has No Science Behind Its School Masking Mandate – Wirepoints
• The CDC’s lies have destroyed its legitimacy – The Federalist
• Kid’s last Covid Policy Makes No Sense – The Atlantic
• How the CDC Abandoned Science – Tablet
• The Case Against Masks at Schools – The Atlantic
• Masking: A Careful Review of the Evidence – AIER
• More than 150 Comparative Studies and Articles on Mask Ineffectiveness and Harms – Brownstone Institute
• Did Mask Mandates Work? The Data Is In … And the Answer Is ‘No’ – Bloomberg,
• Growing calls to take masks off children in school – NPR
• Politics Getting Bad For Those Using Children As Human Covid Shields – Wirepoints
• That Study of Face Masks Does Not Show What the CDC Claims – Reason
• Nearly 40 percent of all Illinois COVID deaths in the last month are breakthroughs. What gives? – Wirepoints
• Why Americans Can’t Trust the CDC’s COVID-19 Advice – Reason
• Another Dumb Fact-Check From The BGA – Wirepoints
• Property Taxes And Madigan: Another Strange ‘Fact-Check’ From The BGA – Wirepoints
• BGA’s Fact-Check Corrupts The Terms ‘Fact-Check’ And ‘Corrupt’ – Wirepoints