My friend Aaron Sibarium, the Washington Free Beacon’s resident anti-woke wunderkind/enfant terrible, has a long investigative piece about the politicization of the American Academy of Pediatrics that I would commend to all of our readers. There are too many revelations in the piece (which was published on both the Free Beacon website and Bari Weiss’s Common Sense Substack) to rehearse here, but just to give you a sense of what we’re working with, check out this little nugget about the AAP’s efforts to rewrite its own scientific literature so as to not undermine the pro-masking-kids policy push:
From masking toddlers to boosters for 12-year-olds, the group’s guidelines were consistently out of sync with those of the rest of the world, but very much in line with the demands of anti-Trump partisans.
“The AAP cared much more about political science than true science,” one pediatrician said.
When schools began to reopen, at first in red states, the group advised that every child, including toddlers, should remain masked for the duration of the day—despite the fact that the AAP had until then stressed the importance of facial cues for early childhood development—even as most other Western countries opted against masking young kids…As recently as August 2022, the AAP tweeted that “there is no evidence” that masks can harm childhood language development.
But prior to the pandemic, the AAP itself had argued that seeing faces is critical for early childhood development.
According to Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, a book published by the AAP in 2018, visually impaired children “are slower to acquire adjectives and verbs” than their sighted peers, and, at younger ages, are less likely to smile because “smiling is learned by seeing others smile”—findings that raise obvious concerns about masks in schools. In the August 2022 tweet, however, the AAP asserted that “visually impaired children develop speech and language at the same rate as their peers.”
Another AAP publication, this one geared toward parents and available at least since 2013, emphasized the link between “face time” and “emotional health”—only for the document to disappear from the AAP’s website during the pandemic. An AAP spokesperson attributed the disappearance to a “web content migration” and said it had “nothing to do with AAP’s mask guidance,” telling Reuters that the document would be republished on a new platform.
It never was: When Common Sense and the Free Beacon asked to be directed to the document’s new home, a spokesperson for the AAP said it “was removed because it was outdated.”