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Making pre-school children wear masks is bad public health

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Sunil BhopalORCiD

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND).

Abstract

© 2021Children are not small adults. This is a critical point that many pediatricians and other child health professionals get bored of saying, yet it does seem to need repeating. While children have the lowest risk from COVID-19 directly, they risk suffering the indirect impacts of policy decisions, many of which appear to have been made with next to no explicit consideration of their interests. Public health interventions should not only be about infectious disease control, they should consider a broad set of outcomes. In addition, they ought to consider vulnerability, including that in early childhood - a time when young children's brains are developing rapidly and are most susceptible to adversity. We believe that mandating masking of pre-school children is not in line with public health principles, and needs to be urgently re-considered.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Hughes RC, Bhopal SS, Tomlinson M

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Public Health in Practice

Year: 2021

Volume: 2

Print publication date: 01/11/2021

Online publication date: 02/10/2021

Acceptance date: 16/09/2021

Date deposited: 09/01/2024

ISSN (electronic): 2666-5352

Publisher: Elsevier B.V.

URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhip.2021.100197

DOI: 10.1016/j.puhip.2021.100197

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