Several doctors and scientists are speaking out against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID-19 guidance for summer camps as “unfairly draconian” and “cruel to our children.”
Last month, the CDC issued updated guidance for vaccinated and unvaccinated people, including requirements for youth and summer camps, where masks must be worn by everyone over 2 years old, even outdoors and regardless of vaccination status. Children and camp counselors must also remain three feet from each other outdoors and refrain from playing any contact games or sharing art supplies, toys or books.
The guidelines have faced criticism as being too restrictive. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Wednesday the guidance “looks a bit strict” but that he expects they will be “continually” reevaluated as the weeks go on.
Dimitri Christakis, an epidemiologist and editor-in-chief of JAMA Pediatrics, the leading journal for pediatric medicine, told New York magazine that he believes requiring children to wear masks and social distance outdoors “is unfairly draconian” and “ridiculous.”
“We’ve consistently deprioritized the essential needs of human childhood. Keeping kids out of school, enforcing social distance on them,” he said. “We have to try as best we can to give children their lives back.”
Mark Gorelik, a pediatric immunologist at Columbia University, said, “We know that the risk of outdoor infection is very low. We know risks of children becoming seriously ill or even ill at all is vanishingly small. And most of the vulnerable population is already vaccinated.
“I am supportive of effective measures to restrain the spread of illness,” he told New York magazine. “However, the CDC’s recommendations cross the line into excess and are, frankly, senseless. Children cannot be running around outside in 90-degree weather wearing a mask. Period.”
“Irrational recommendations will do no good [and] could, in this case, do harm and really discredit federal agencies,” he added.
An infectious-disease scientist at Dr. Fauci’s NIH, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, called the guidance “virtue signaling,” New York magazine reported.
“With staff and parents vaccinated, there is no reason to continue incredibly strict mitigation efforts or put severe limitations on activities,” the scientist said. “Requiring kids to continuously wear masks at camps, even while outside playing in the heat, when it provides little additional protection is unfair and cruel to our children. Considering that children are at incredibly low risk for developing severe illness, the minimal benefits of mask-wearing do not outweigh the substantial costs of discouraging children to be active and their overall health.”
Dr. Fauci told the “Today” show’s Savannah Guthrie on Wednesday that the CDC’s summer camp guidelines are “conservative” but not “excessive.”
At Wednesday’s White House COVID-19 response team briefing, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said the goal of the summer camp guidance was to avoid “what we saw in outbreaks in camps last summer.”
