West Cook News

As one of the last holdouts demanding students wear masks in school, Village of Oak Park Health Director Theresa Chapple took to Twitter Wednesday, citing an Arizona study she says supports her pro-mask position. 

But eight independent public health researchers who examined the Chapple-cited study in December found it "profoundly misleading" and said it "ought to be excluded from this debate (on masks)," according to a report in The Atlantic magazine.

“You can’t learn anything about the effects of school mask mandates from this study,” Jonathan Ketcham, a public-health economist at Arizona State University, told The Atlantic's David Zweig.

Stanford scientist Noah Haber told Zweig the Arizona study, which looked at COVID-19 data from 1,000 public schools in Arizona, was “so unreliable that it probably should not have been entered into the public discourse.”

The study cited by Chapple, who has fought re-opening schools and argued for continued lockdowns, claims that schools without mask mandates were "3.5 times as likely to experience COVID outbreaks as the ones that did."

Critics say "the study’s methodology and data set appear to have significant flaws," significantly that it claimed to track COVID-19 outbreaks between July 15 and August 31, 2021, when only a small number of schools alleged to be in the study were even open.

Also, the Arizona study defined a school "outbreak" as "two or more COVID-19 cases among students or staff members at a school within a 14-day period."

“The measure of two cases in a school is problematic,” former CDC official and State University of New York at Albany epidemiologist Louise-Anne McNutt, told Zweig. “It doesn’t tell us that transmission occurred in school.”

Yale economics professor Jason Abaluck, who led a 340,000-person randomized trial of masking in Bangladesh, told Zweig it was "ridiculous" that failed to control for the vaccination status of staff or students.

The Arizona study has also been cited by U.S. Centers for Disease Controls Director Rochelle Walensky.

"The agency’s decision to trumpet the study’s dubious findings, and subsequent lack of transparency, raise questions about its commitment to science-guided policy," Zweig wrote.

Oak Park-River Forest High School District 200, Oak Park Elementary School District 97 and Fenwick High School are all still requiring their students to wear masks, citing Chapple's authority.

The River Forest District 90 School Board voted Tuesday night to keep students wearing masks.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker's statewide mask mandate was declared "null and void" by a Sangamon County judge on Feb. 4, calling the governor's attempts to bypass citizen due process a "type of evil." His appeal of the ruling was denied on Feb. 17; the governor's appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court has yet to be accepted.

The requirement of masks for students is currently illegal in Illinois.

More than 730 of the state's 845 school districts have gone "mask optional," including Elmwood Park District 401, Clarendon Hills-Hinsdale District 282, Western Springs District 101 and LaGrange-Brookfield District 102.

St. Luke's School in River Forest has also gone mask-optional.

The largest study of youth and COVID-19, reported in December, found that there wasn't a single healthy child between the ages of 5 and 18 in Germany who died from the virus in the first 15 months of its presence. Odds of "serious illness" was one in 50,000 for a healthy child aged 5-11. UK government data found a total of six healthy children out of a total of 12 million have died in the country of COVID-19.

The CDC's European sister agency, the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, says masks are "not recommended for students."

The World Health Organization does not recommend children under age 6 wear masks and says children 6-11 should wear them only in areas of "widespread transmission" and when required to interact with "other people who are at high risk of developing serious illness, such as the elderly and those with other underlying health conditions."

"Does that Face Mask Really Protect You," a 2010 research article by Dr. Larry E. Bowen of the Southern Research Institute in Birmingham, Ala., fit various types of masks on a mannequin to study their effectiveness, found that wearing surgical, bandana and dust masks offer "very little protection" and concluded that "wearing these face masks may produce a false sense of protection."