Masks have been a farce for two years now, providing little protection against the spread of COVID, blocking as they do large particles but not virus-sized ones.  Those 350,000 COVID deaths on Joe Biden's watch didn't come about in 2021 because people refused to wear masks.

And as election day approaches, Democrats in multiple blue cities and states are suddenly dropping mask mandates all at once.  They know it's killing them in the polls.

But against all that "science," New York's Mayor Eric Adams declared he'd like to keep...a little of it.

Mayor Adams on Friday announced the end of mask mandates for most public school kids starting next week — but he's keeping the controversial requirement for the city's youngest.

Children in kindergarten through 12th grade will no longer have to don face coverings indoors starting Monday, but early-education students aged 4 and under and those in day care centers will still have to mask up.

"When you look at those under 5, they were more likely to be hospitalized," Adams asserted.

"People wanted to say 'Let's lift across the board', but that's not what the science was showing us. I know some people are concerned. I would rather people complain against me than . . . losing my babies in our city."

So masks on babies, but no masks on the adults who can speak out and share with their friends that mask mandates stink?  Seems the little ones who can't complain continue to get the bum's rush.

I have no idea whom this crummy carve-out benefits.  It absolutely makes no sense.

Contrary to the nonsense that Adams spews, children are far less likely to be hospitalized for COVID than other people who catch COVID.

According to the New York Post:

Despite Adams' claim, data collected by the American Academy of Pediatrics shows that just 0.1% to 1.5% of child COVID cases resulted in hospitalization and 0.00% to 0.01% resulted in deaths.

Research in fact shows that their little immune systems work faster than those of adults to kill it off.

Children are also less likely to catch it in the first place based on their natural capacity to fight it off, so it never even gets started.

The science, in fact, shows that it's the elderly and those with compromised immune systems or co-morbidities such as diabetes or obesity who carry the highest risk.  Babies and toddlers are nothingburgers as hosts for COVID.

Adams is making that arbitrary call because there is as of yet no vaccine for children under five.

That's a load of garbage, because the rest of his sudden order to normalize life in New York City also includes dropping vaccine mandates.  Anyone who's not vaxxed in New York City, and that includes a helluva lot of skeptical black voters and frontline health care workers with natural immunity, is no longer subject to discrimination about where he can eat, what he can shop for, or where he can go to school based on vaccination status.

In New York City, that's just under 2 million people according to Adams's own New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene data, or, 13.9% of the population of all ages in New York City.

So we have these 2 million people walking around crowded New York City unvaxxed, and somehow only the babies among them are dangerous to others for the spread of COVID?

It's insane.

What's more, it's unusually nefarious, given that new studies are showing that putting masks on small children actually harms them, stunting their speech, social, and facial recognition development.

According to CBC of Canada:

"That first year of life is when speech and language are emerging in a major major way," said David Lewkowicz, senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories and a professor adjunct at the Yale Child Study Center.

Lewkowicz has been researching the importance of visual speech information, or lipreading, in children and babies since long before the pandemic. He co-authored a 2012 study that showed babies a short video of a woman talking, and used an eye-tracking device to capture where on the woman's face the babies focused their gaze.

"What we discovered, in a nutshell, was that at four months of age babies were really interested in the eyes of the talker. But then at eight months of age there was a really dramatic shift … where they started to look much more at the mouth region of the person that was talking to them."

That's called "science," done by scientists, and what Adams is shoving out there to the babies of New York is little more than child abuse. 

The problem isn't just limited to speech and social development, either.  Imagine the psychological trauma the little ones will go through based on this mandate.  A kid of 5 turns 6 and now is told he is no longer a disease vector and can drop the mask?  The kid will know that he is not significantly different from age 5 and 364 days, but somehow, it takes blowing out six candles for the mask to come off.  What's that going to do to the kid's mental health?  

One wonders what the lawsuits will be like years down the line as those toddlers whose speech development and social well-being were harmed based on this mandate grow old enough to sue.  We know that will happen. 

Here's the other thing: Adams's pseudoscience is apparently operative only in New York City.  Somehow not having mask mandates for babies in places like Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and all the other places that have dumped mask mandates hasn't led to a huge upsweep in COVID for the population as a whole, spread by all those supposedly disease-carrying babies, or in a slew of child hospitalizations.  New York kids are different?

Something here stinks of politics, of special interests with a vested interest in keeping kids masked forever.  Is it the teachers' union?  The daycare workers' union, if there is one?  The mask-manufacturing lobby?  At this point, I don't know, but like anyone else, it's pretty obvious that this idiocy is some kind of political calculation at work.  It certainly isn't what anyone could call "science."  And it's a vile and bullying way to treat the littlest and most helpless of New Yorkers who can't lash out by themselves at the harmful mandate.  Their only hope now is for the parents to revolt, which could happen if the blue city of San Francisco's Board of Education recall is any indicator.

Giving babies the shaft is no way to do politics, Eric-o.  Get ready for the protests that mobilize in New York for the politician who's actually proven that he's no friend of babies. 

 Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.