Happy October Show Mo Facts readers! We are now less than thirty-five days until Election Day, so we hope you’ll continue with us on our journey to #showmofacts. This week it's current Attorney General and Republican Senate nominee Eric Schmitt, back in the hot set. Schmitt’s team has put out a number of ads in the past week so his material will be taking up our entire week! With that, let's dive right in.
This ad was posted to Schmitt’s Twitter on September 26th. This video is filmed by Schmitt himself as he walks through a suburban neighborhood and is in response to his Democratic opponent, Trudy Busch Valentine’s interview with the Kansas City Star Editorial Board in which she discussed COVID-19. Schmitt makes several false claims about Busch Valentine, masking in schools, and the science of COVID-19, but we will be focusing on one of his most incorrect claims.
Claim: Masks hurt kids psychologically and emotionally.
Fact: This claim is not necessarily a fringe belief. A poll conducted by Politico and Harvard in March 2022 found that thirty-nine percent of parents believe that masking policies over the previous year in schools had hurt their child’s mental and emotional health. Though, interestingly, this belief was only held by twenty-nine percent of parents whose child’s school still had a masking requirement at the time of the survey, compared to forty-nine percent of parents whose school no longer had the requirement.
While parental concern for their children’s mental health is justified, scientific research would suggest that this concern is largely unfounded.
One concern that has been expressed by parents in the survey is that children's social development is harmed by masks because they are unable to read the emotions of teachers or other students due to the obscuration of their faces. Considering that visually impaired children develop at the same rate as their peers and that studies have shown that masks do not make emotions any more difficult for children to read than sunglasses do, this fear has largely been overstated (See the graph from the study below). Children have a high capacity for reading emotions, and while masks do make it slightly more difficult, children are able to adapt and overcome.
Another mental health concern of masking children is it will negatively impact a child’s mental health. This has largely been proven to be untrue. Researchers have found that the most significant negative impact on the mental health of kids came early in the pandemic when remote learning was the norm. This separation from their peers is what was actually harming the mental health of kids. Masking policies of schools were put in place to remedy this by getting kids back in the classroom while at the same time mitigating the spread of COVID-19. Walter Gilliam, a child psychiatry and psychology professor at Yale University, summarized this point in a National Geographic article saying, “It’s the trauma of COVID that the masks were intended to prevent…. When you have an ache and a pain, it’s the cut on your arm not the Band-Aid that went over it that’s causing the problem. The purpose of the mask is to reduce all the other traumas—traumas that we know for an absolute fact harm children”.
One last point of Schmitt’s ad is his characterization of COVID-19 prevention measures as “nonsense”. Over one million Americans have died from COVID-19 at the time of this writing including 21,451 Missourians. To call efforts to prevent more Americans from dying from COVID-19 “nonsense” is a dangerous use of rhetoric as it could be responsible for more deaths in the future, as what political party you belong to and what political leaders you listen to have a correlation with whether or not you will get vaccinated.
Due to Schmitt’s mischaracterization of the social development and mental health impacts of children wearing masks and school, his diminishment of the loss of life due to COVID-19, and his unwillingness to accept the role he has in preventing future COVID-19 deaths we rate this ad as EXTREME on our Pants on Fire O-Meter.
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