(LifeSiteNews) — An 11-month-old baby boy suffocated after being forced to wear a mask at a daycare facility in New Taipei, Taiwan. The mask had become soaked with the baby’s tears and mucus from crying as the frustrated child tried to reject the mask, inhibiting his ability to breath.
Multiple local news outlets offer the same details surrounding the tragic occurrence, noting that all the children at the infant care center were required to wear face masks due to an increase in childhood colds and flu in the region.
Others have noted that although the mask mandate for school children and daycare centers was lifted last year, post COVID-19 mask-wearing remains deeply woven into many cultures.
The heartbroken parents — who reportedly had tried for nine years to conceive and have a child and had been preparing for their only son’s first birthday — have filed a lawsuit against the daycare manager and three staff members for negligent homicide, according to FocusTaiwan.tw.
The report, quoting CTS news anchor Lin Yen-ju who broke the story on Facebook, continues:
According to surveillance video footage viewed by the parents … the incident on Monday happened when the boy became irritated and took off his mask, after which the teacher put it back on for him.
At that point, the child burst out crying, which “possibly saturated the mask with tears and mucus, causing it to stick to his nose and mouth and suffocate him,” the message said.
READ: The science establishment still can’t admit that masks don’t prevent COVID transmission
In the video footage, the child was then seen “struggling” and “falling over.” The teacher, however, apparently assumed he had become exhausted and fallen asleep, and only discovered that he was unresponsive 20 minutes later, when it was time to move the kids to another room, the message said.
“There are daycare centers all over Taipei and I see kids inside wearing masks,” a local who wished to remain anonymous told LifeSiteNews.
“Everywhere in Taipei, public spaces have constant reminders to wear masks. They will emphasize that they’re not required but highly recommended to wear masks,” he explained. “Of course, the message sinks in and people get paranoid whenever it’s flu season.”
“The government, as usual, covered their a**es by responding with the official declaration made a year ago that kids in daycare are not required to wear masks,” he added.
‘Forcing people to wear masks has been a failure of public health’
A systematic review published late last year in BMJ’s Archives of Diseases in Childhood shows that public health officials were wrong to mandate masks for children due to an absence of high-quality evidence, according to a report by Maryanne Demasi reprinted in LifeSiteNews.
The study outlined “an extensive body of research” suggesting the harms associated with children wearing masks and added that “we fail to find any evidence of benefit from masking children, to either protect themselves or those around them, from COVID-19.”
The authors concluded that “recommending child masking does not meet the accepted practice of promulgating only medical interventions where benefits clearly outweigh harms.”
“Forcing people to wear masks has been a failure of public health,” said Peter Gøtzsche, a physician and scientist who is an expert in research methodology. “The reason we are still having the mask debate is because authorities relied on trash studies to justify their use, and wanted to appear as if they were doing something. In a crisis, it is always more difficult to do nothing.”