In New York City, the leftist war on children continues under a new health czar

If there are only two things that the last two years have taught us, they are (1) that young children do not get extremely sick or from COVID, nor do they spread it, and (2) that cloth and paper masks are ineffectual against a virus.  However, New York City's new health commissioner, Ashwin Vasan, doesn't let little things like facts get in the way.  He's doubled down on keeping children five and under smothered in masks for the indefinite future, even as mandates for adults are finally going away.  Because there is no health reason behind it, the only reason, a sinister one, can be to train both children and their parents to obey the government at all times.

The Daily Mail has the story:

New York City's new health commissioner sparked outrage after announcing that children aged five and under should wear face masks indefinitely, bucking the national trend of ditching masks and going in the face of vast evidence that kids are at little risk from Covid-19.

'I think it's indefinite at this point,' Dr. Ashwin Vasan said Friday during a COVID-19 briefing in Queens. 'People who have tried to predict what's going to happen in the future in this pandemic have repeatedly found egg on their face, as they say, and I'm not going to do that here today.'

The woke commissioner, who lives in Brooklyn with his partner and three children, including a four-year-old son, argued he wanted to mask children because under fives are not vaccinated.

'As a father of a two-and-a-half-year old-and two other older kids, I want to keep them as safe as possible. I would love nothing more than to send my son to daycare without a mask,' Vasan said, according to CBS New York.

'But as a scientist, and as a doctor, and an epidemiologist, I want to keep him safe because he's not eligible for a vaccine.'

To know what the risks are to children, the CDC has just issued revised — and presumably accurate — numbers from COVID deaths.  (The numbers are around 70,000 lower than they were just days ago.)  According to the chart, below, 406 children in the 0–4 age group have died from COVID, while 310 children in the 5–11 age group have died.  If we assume that the 310 deaths are spread equally among those ages, that would mean that 44 or so five-year-olds died.  The rough total, then, for deaths in the five-and-under age group would be 354.

A child's death is always tragic, so I'm not trying to discount those deaths in any way.  Nevertheless, given that there are roughly 24.8 million children aged 0–5 in America, that means that 0.0014% of American children died over the course of two years from COVID.  That shows that COVID is a very, very, very low-risk disease for little children.

Additionally, we know that children are not major COVID vectors.  Oh, and of course, we know that those cloth and paper masks are useless against viruses because viruses are about one thousandth the size of the bacteria that the masks are meant for.

With these data in mind, why in the world is Vasan insisting on keeping little children — active, sensitive, still-learning-how-to-speak little children — smothered in cloth or paper masks?  It's clearly child abuse:

Once we establish that this sadism cannot have as its purpose protecting the children or the adults around them from COVID, there must be a different reason. I think the answer to that question comes from Adam Carolla:

"Why? Why the kids, and why the emphasis on the kids? This hasn't been dangerous for kids. We've known this. This kills sick people, old people, obese people, comorbidity people. It doesn't ostensibly affect kids; they're in the safest category," Carolla pointed out.

[snip]

"Well, just remember this phrase, Megyn: 'crate training.'" He elaborated, "You cannot train a dog when it's middle-aged. You got to get them when they're puppies. And get them trained up and into that crate. And that's what we're doing with kids. Because this will not be the last emergency. And it will not be the last time the government and the governor and the mayor need to exact their power."

"And so, let's get the kids into the crate," Carolla continued. "Let's get them coached up. And then they'll be ours. We can do whatever we want with them after that. They'll listen to anything. They'll be good subjects."

Exactly — and it trains the parents, as well, reminding them that the government, not the parents, has the ultimate say over their children.

This is a cult, and you and your children are involuntary members:

Image: Toddler fighting a mask.  YouTube screen grab.

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