If you see a video of a toddler being dragged off a plane for not masking correctly, you can be sure the video was taken in America.
In what has become a bizarre ritual of over-the-top rule-following zealotry coupled with misplaced and unscientific COVID fear, another child was pulled off an airplane last week for not wearing a mask correctly.
Amanda Pendarvis and her 2-year-old were forced to deplane when the toddler couldn’t keep his mask on. Pendarvis says her son was having an asthma attack at the time.
The video of the child saying “no, no” while his mom attempts to keep the mask on him is heart-wrenching.
It would be painful to do this to children if it were necessary in the name of safety, but it simply is not.
Last week, new Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that the state will return to a policy that requires masking of all kids 2 years and older in a day-care or school setting. This pathetic, pointless mandate is as cruel as it is dumb. The new boss might be worse than the old boss.
In November 2020, President Donald Trump said, “Look at the data, the spread from children and among children is not very big at all, not like one would have suspected.” Actually, it wasn’t Trump who said that but Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has led the American response so poorly and yet remains a voice we are forced to listen to endlessly on our television sets.
Absolutely no data have been released to alter what Fauci said, not even with the Delta variant, yet we continue to take this anti-science approach to kids.
The World Health Organization does not recommend masking children under age 6. In Europe, some airlines follow this guideline, but many carve their own saner path. KLM and Icelandair require masks at age 10. British Airways and Air France start at 11. No one but airlines inside the United States starts masking at the absurd age of 2 years old.
We are unique in our madness. We’ve lost our minds. And our humanity.
Another mom shared on her Facebook page a harrowing story last week about a JetBlue flight attendant who’d harassed her 9-year-old daughter. The daughter, who has special needs, wasn’t wearing a mask correctly.
“My daughter is visibly a special-needs child,” Berman writes. “She is deaf (wears a hearing aid on one ear and a cochlear implant on the other); her walking requires an incredible amount of energy on her part, because, again, she is deaf and deafness is significantly related to vestibular issues. She has vision loss. She has breathing issues.”
“Throughout the flight, Matt [the flight attendant] insisted she put it on ‘right now!,’ EVEN WHILE SHE WAS EATING! Legitimately, she was in the process of chewing (it takes her longer than most kids to chew), and he said strongly for her to put the mask on.”
The kicker? Matt took off his own mask while making announcements to the plane. We all know it’s a big problem to have your face covered when you need to communicate. How come we don’t realize that applies to kids as well?
We’ve let the Matts of the world go on their power trip for too long. You don’t have to have a 2-year-old to understand that this callous approach should not stand. We’ve rendered kids unimportant for far too long during this pandemic.
Masking all children is wrong, which is why Europe is moving away from it completely — but masking toddlers is sadistic; it’s the main piece of evidence that we’ve gone way too far. Let’s find our compassion toward children while also embracing the science we’ve known all along.
Stop masking kids. Stop it now.
Twitter: @Karol
