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By Jessica Grose

Mandatory masking at schools has been among the biggest issues in the country over the past few months, with instances of mask opponents berating and threatening school board meeting attendees. The topic has become highly politicized, and it’s sure to get even more contentious now that the Food and Drug Administration has authorized the emergency use of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children ages 5 to 11.

Linsey Marr, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech who studies the airborne transmission of viruses, said that when she tweeted about a potential timeline for lifting of masking rules once 5- to 11-year-olds start getting Covid vaccines, she was flooded with replies from all sides.

“I’m almost afraid to talk about it, because people have such differing and strong opinions on this topic,” she told me. “I put my thoughts out there, because we need to figure this out. The vaccine should change things for us, and we don’t want kids to wear masks in school indefinitely.”

Some folks replying to Marr were adamant about the need for masks in schools as long as Covid is with us, especially to protect immunocompromised children and children under 5, who still won’t be able to get vaccinated. But that argument might assume that there are no downsides to children wearing masks all day, every day, indefinitely, which is something we can’t say with certainty.

The Covid pandemic is mostly unprecedented in our lives, and “we don’t have the data on what two years of masking children in an early learning environment has to do with their socio-emotional development,” said David Rubin, the director of PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of pediatrics at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine.

It’s worth noting that the World Health Organization’s website says, “In general, children ages 5 and under should not be required to wear masks.” That contrasts with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that “masks should be worn indoors by all individuals (ages 2 and older) who are not fully vaccinated.” (It’s easy to see why people find this all very confusing.) Additionally, there’s concern that children with speech difficulties, or who have autism or sensory challenges, may be hurt by all-day mask wearing.

Because the masking issue has been so divisive, I fear we haven’t been able to have a practical, nuanced and data-driven conversation about what a good masking policy would look like now that nearly all school-age kids can soon be vaccinated. In some big cities and blue states, kids are wearing masks constantly, including outdoors, even though, as The New York Times’s David Leonhardt reported in May, the science indicates that “masks make a huge difference indoors and rarely matter outdoors.” Some red states, meanwhile, prevent schools from requiring masks. None of this makes sense.

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