Mother of four blasts ‘political theater’ of mask mandates after daughter gets sick
Mother of four Ashley Mcguire on penning scathing op-ed after 9-year-old daughter was forced to wear mask playing tennis.
A Washington, D.C. mother is pushing back on "political theater" after her nine-year-old daughter was forced to wear a mask while playing tennis at a summer camp.
"I went to pick up my daughter from camp. And it was the hottest day of the year, 98 degrees. When I went to pick her up, she looked sick. And I asked her when she got in the car if she had to keep her mask on outside for three hours of tennis and she said yes," Ashley McGuire told "Fox & Friends."
The mom of four "couldn’t believe" that the Sidwell Friends School summer camp called her to complain that her daughter kept pulling down her mask.
"I thought to myself, you know who of us have ever had to play tennis outside for three hours wearing a mask. I think it's absurd, unfair, and unhealthy. It's not based on science what we're asking kids to do," McGuire said.
McGuire wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed questioning the mask mandate pushed on kids despite the extreme heat in some places.
McGuire wrote, "Multiple peer-reviewed studies have found that children transmit the virus at a much lower rate than adults do. The latest comprehensive data show that children have an extremely low chance of dying or becoming seriously ill from Covid-19, and that the child mortality rate is much lower than what public-health officials had initially suspected."
"From Dec. 1 to Jan. 22, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigated nine school Covid clusters involving students and educators in a Georgia school district. The study found teachers involved in eight clusters and clearly driving the spread in four, and only one cluster where a student clearly drove spread. This led the CDC to point the finger at ‘educators,’ not children, as likely playing 'a central role in-school transmission networks.'"
McGuire said that since the pandemic started, there is a lot of research that shows "with abundant clarity that children are not at serious risk" from coronavirus and they are not spreaders. She also said community child care centers have been open since the pandemic started
"I mean, one group of parents sent their kids' masks to a lab and found those masks had diseases on them far riskier to kids than Covid. Things like pneumonia, Legionnaires, and meningitis," McGuire said.
"What about the psychological harm of requiring children to wear masks for eight hours a day, again, including outside in debilitating heat like my daughter had to do?"
In a statement, Sidwell Friends School said the camp, like other school-operated camps in the city, is following "masking requirements set by D.C.’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education."
On Monday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said the Big Apple plans to keep their school mask mandate in place when students return to the classroom this fall, despite new federal guidance stating that fully vaccinated students and teachers do not need to wear a mask indoors.
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When asked about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention new mask guidance, the Democratic mayor replied, "Look, we've been constantly working with the CDC, but we also in this case have been very careful – given everything the city's been through – so I'm absolutely confident based on this guidance and everything else we've seen that we'll be able to get all our kids back in school in September."
New York City isn't the only place where school mask mandates are set to remain. On the same day the CDC released its new guidance – last Friday – California state health officials made it clear that masks would still be required in schools across the state this fall.
Fox News' Breck Dumas contributed to this report.
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