In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a summary of a study of COVID-19 mitigation measures, including masks. The study covered more than 90,000 elementary-school students in 169 Georgia schools over a four-week period last fall. The CDC said it was the first of its kind to compare COVID-19 incidence in schools that had instituted certain mitigation measures to other schools without those measures.
But Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute says the federal agency omitted certain findings that contradicted their own guidelines.
"They didn't talk about distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters and masking – and that those had statistically insignificant benefits," she tells AFN. In other words, those measures could not be said to be effective.
In an article about the CDC summary, David Zweig wrote for the Intelligencer:
"[T]he decision not to include the null effects of a student masking requirement (and distancing, hybrid models, etc.) in the summary amounted to 'file drawering' these findings, a term researchers use for the practice of burying studies that don’t produce statistically significant results."
Higgins contends the CDC had no good reason for burying that information in their summary. "This information that the CDC concealed from its public summary should be made available to everyone so they can make – what the Left calls all the time – informed decisions based on science," she argues.
In her own article about the CDC summary, Higgins contends leftists "care more about exploiting children for their ideological purposes than protecting them." And that, she says, constitutes an "abuse of science" simply to justify mask mandates for children.
