Biden Health Official Defends Forcing 2-Year-Olds to Wear Masks

Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra speaks in Orange, Calif., on March 9, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra defended a policy requiring 2-year-olds to wear masks as a condition to participate in a low-income financial assistance program.

The Head Start program is an HHS initiative that manages a series of facilities across the United States providing education, nutrition, and parental engagement services for low-income families. During the COVID-19 pandemic, HHS imposed a rule requiring children participating in the program, who range from birth to five years old, to be vaccinated and wear a face mask.

The policy prompted criticism due to the low proportion of COVID-19 deaths among the youngest members of society.

According to provisional figures by the CDC, children aged zero to 4 years old accounted for less than a tenth of a percent of COVID deaths, and in most cases, other health conditions were factors in these deaths. The broad majority of COVID-19 deaths came from people older than 65.

Opponents of masking children have also noted that such requirements can have substantial detrimental effects on children’s social and intellectual development. A crucial aspect of human social development involves seeing and learning to interpret social cues from facial expressions. Masks diminish the clarity of such cues, leading to fears that children raised in the midst of the pandemic will have developmental and social issues for years to come.

Children wear a mask and wait for President Joe Biden to visit their pre-Kindergarten class at East End Elementary School to highlight the early childhood education proposal in his Build Back Better infrastructure agenda in North Plainfield, N.J., on Oct. 25, 2021. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Critics have also questioned the effectiveness of masks against COVID-19, noting that on a microbial level, the virus is substantially smaller than the spaces between the fibers of masks. Studies suggest that masking may have little impact on the spread of respiratory viruses like COVID-19.

Nevertheless, when pressed on the value of the mask mandate by Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.), Becerra defended it.

“Mr. Secretary, did forcing 2-year-olds to wear masks save lives?” Kiley asked.

“Making sure people were masked when it was appropriate was essential to making sure we were able to get out of this pandemic,” Becerra responded.

“Can you point to any evidence that there was a public health benefit to forcing young children to wear masks?” Kiley pressed Becerra.

“Well the fact that today we are not losing lives the way we lost them when we first got into this pandemic,” Becerra responded.

Kiley interjected, again asking if the mask requirement on children as young as two saved lives.

“That’s your interpretation,” Becerra responded. “What I’m saying to you is that using good policies that give us the precautions to keep our families from contracting COVID are helping save lives.”

Opposition

Republicans long sought a repeal of the policy, which required children as well as staffers at Head Start facilities to wear masks and be vaccinated.

In April 2022, Reps. David Joyce (R-Ohio) and Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), the latter of whom has a degree in medicine, put forward a resolution to end the mandate.

“The federal government should not be using taxpayer dollars to force children as young as two years old to wear face masks,” Joyce said at the time. “If parents or individual Head Start programs want to mask themselves or their kids, they have every right to do so.

“But the federal government should not insert itself into that decision-making process, especially when children are the least at risk for COVID-19 but the most likely to suffer developmental setbacks from prolonged masking.”

“Our students have been negatively impacted by school closures and remote learning, especially in low-income and rural communities. Loss of learning, lack of socialization, and increased rates of depression and suicide show just how much our students have suffered,” Meeks-Miller echoed.

In January 2023, HHS ended the masking requirement for Head Start participants but left the vaccine mandate intact.

It was not until May 2023 that the agency announced an end to the vaccine requirements.

But that decision only came after Judge James Wesley Hendrix of the Northern District of Texas struck down the mandate on March 31, calling it “unprecedented,” “unauthorized,” and “procedurally improper” (pdf).

Hendrix ruled that the mandate was illegal because “(1) no permissible construction of the Head Start Act could authorize the rule; (2) HHS failed to follow proper rulemaking procedures; and (3) the rule is arbitrary and capricious.”

In his memorandum announcing an end to the mandate, Becerra nevertheless contended that his agency’s mandate was founded in an “evidence-based COVID-19 mitigation policy.”

Meanwhile, unwanted attention was focused on Becerra’s agency in April after explosive whistleblower allegations claimed that HHS was acting as a crucial “middleman” in cartel sex trafficking operations.

Becerra himself was alleged to have been dismissive of concerns that children were being sent to criminal and cartel-affiliated sponsors, telling officials during a leaked phone call that children should be moved across the border into the interior “like a Ford assembly line.”

Republicans are currently considering legislation that would seek to address the wide-ranging uses of regulatory authority dubbed the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act, or REINS Act.

That bill would require any regulation stemming from the executive branch with a substantial impact on the economy to be approved by Congress.

While Becerra’s masking rule likely would not have applied for congressional scrutiny under the terms of the REINS Act, the issue of executive rule-making and its effects on society has been a topic of keen interest for the GOP majority in the House.