"Making children wear masks is a political and not a scientific choice"

Samuel Fitoussi is a student, founder and writer of the satirical blog La Gazette de l'Étudiant.

There is something strange, unhealthy, and somewhat immoral about seeing nightclubs open but six-year-olds masked all day at school and subject to strict rules of distancing.

While the incidence rate increases and calls multiply to toughen up school measures, instead propose to stop sacrificing children.

Let us first note that if the school health protocol is presented by its promoters as a scientific choice, it is in reality a matter of moral arbitration. Science cannot make a value judgment on how we should weigh the benefits of the mask in school (limiting viral circulation) against its costs (loss of well-being for 13 million children). Unfortunately, many people disguise their moral arbitration as scientific truth - an attitude harmful to democratic debate since it implies that opposition to health measures is always fueled by rejection of science.

Those who argue for maintaining the wearing of masks at school seem to do so regardless of any cost-benefit consideration, its health benefits being almost never quantified and never weighed against its costs.

Samuel Fitoussi

Remember that all is not good for saving lives.

Several thousand French people die on the road each year, a figure that we could drastically reduce by halving all speed limits.

A measure that no one is proposing, since we believe that its benefits would be lower than its social costs.

Likewise, we tolerate dozens of daily flu deaths each winter because we believe that they are collectively less damaging than the restrictions that should be put in place to avoid them.

It is in the light of this reality that the merits of the health protocol must be assessed. For now, those who argue for its maintenance seem to do so regardless of any cost-benefit consideration, its health benefits being almost never quantified and never weighed against its costs. From how many lives saved per year does it become acceptable to make 13 million children wear a mask all day? It is not illegitimate to consider that a normal year of schooling for a whole generation is worth 15,000 additional deaths. Faced with a virus doomed to become endemic, it is a democratic debate that it is important to have and that doctors - unelected and sometimes subject to conflicts ofinterests (their workload being affected by the number of admissions to the hospital) - do not have to decide on their own.

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The risk of Covid for children is extremely low. If the cost-benefit balance of immunizing children under 12 is debated, it is not because the vaccine is dangerous but because the virus may be even less so. According to the latest report from Public Health France, on October 31, 2021, there were twelve deaths of minors attributable to Covid since the start of the pandemic. Only three of these children did not present with co-morbidities. By way of comparison, 90 children die each year from various infectious and parasitic diseases (influenza, gastroenteritis, bronchiolitis, tonsillitis, etc.); diseases for which no one has ever called for “making schools safer”, no doubt because they are not very dangerous for adults.

As for the danger of the long Covid, note that bronchiolitis, gastro and chickenpox also leave consequences that do not move anyone, and that it is funny that those who claim to be terribly concerned about the health of children do not have the slightest thought for the long-term educational and psychological consequences of the restrictions we place on them.

Certain scientists have adopted a political approach, voluntarily exaggerating certain risks and silencing certain truths in order to encourage arbitration which they judge subjectively to be optimal.

Samuel Fitoussi

To avoid recognizing that we mask children to protect adults, all untruths are allowed

We will affirm with the appearance of each new variant - on the basis of simple testimonies and without any statistical study to support it - that it affects more young people. We have no news of the death that the Delta variant was to cause in children.

Last week, on the set of the show C à Vous (France 5), Gilbert Deray - head of the nephrology service at Pitié-Salpêtrière - affirmed that "

”. Total fantasy - since refuted by many doctors - received with seriousness on the set, in particular by Patrick Cohen, yet so quick to denounce (rightly) the lack of scientific rigor of Didier Raoult.

In the camp of Science, the noble lies - that is to say those which encourage the respect of barrier gestures - seem acceptable.

These approximations nevertheless pose a big democratic problem: the role of scientists and the media is to provide the best possible information because only a precise assessment of the risks incurred by each can make it possible to achieve the collectively optimal social arbitration.

Some scientists have adopted a political approach, deliberately exaggerating certain risks and silencing certain truths (the concept of natural post-infection immunity has become curiously controversial) in order to push for arbitration which they judge subjectively to be optimal.

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So for two years we have been forcing children to sacrifice themselves for a virus against which they are not at risk. Today, can we continue to force them to reduce the risk of adults who choose not to be vaccinated or who want zero risk for them? And as long as the risk of hospital saturation is only hypothetical, can reducing the number of hospitals be a legitimate collective objective? Hospitals must be at the service of the French and not the French - and even less the children - at the service of hospitals. After two years of pandemic, the egoist is perhaps no longer the teenager who takes off his mask but the adult who wants to continue to impose it on him.

Rotting children's education seems to have become a way for the government not to bother adults too much

, to satisfy the restrictionists.

The UK is proving that demagoguery is not the only solution and that there is another way: child welfare as a public policy priority.

There, children can see their teachers' faces again, have lunch with whomever they want, hug their friends, play sports in normal conditions and go to school without the guilty feeling of being infectious agents harmful to the good. -be collective.

While France chooses to be tough on six-year-olds, the UK chooses not to put them at risk of long-term neurological, social and emotional disruption.