I Have Banned Child Masking in My Practice

My Letter to Patients

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I emailed the announcement above to all my patients earlier this week. The night before, I had recorded a podcast for Informed Dissent with attorney Nicole Pearson, who successfully sued the LAUSD to end “vaccine” mandates for public schoolchildren in Los Angeles County. During the interview, we began discussing masking children, something I have called out since summer of 2020 as nothing short of child abuse. She said, “This will end today, if every adult refuses to tolerate it.”

Although I have been speaking out against this nouveau form of child abuse for nearly two years, and I have challenged parents to confront this horrible behavior—essentially a projection of adult fear and anxiety onto children, who have no capacity to consent to the abuse—I have also allowed children, at times, to come to my office with diapers covering their faces. I was concerned that if I pushed too hard, the fearful parents would simply yank their children from treatment, causing even further emotional damage. I have decided that position is no longer tenable.

Physicians are mandated reporters. When we witness or suspect child abuse, we are obligated both ethically and legally to report it to social services or the police. If a child shows up for therapy or medication treatment covered with cigarette burns, a doctor cannot ignore it. Masks are no different. They may not leave physical scars (although they often often result in painful skin infections that can lead to permanent facial disfigurement), but they do cause significant and possibly permanent damage to a child’s brain, retarding speech and language development, crippling social skills, and inciting a vicious cycle of emotional dysregulation leading to major depression, self-harm, and substance abuse. We would never allow someone to do this to our children directly, so why do we condone it through the vehicle of a facemask?

At my first public speaking event since the pandemic began, I announced in May 2020 at the Orange County School Board of Education meeting that we the adults had failed our children by allowing our own fears to drive and sustain the closure of schools. It was, at the time, the biggest mistake we had made in responding to the public health crisis provoked by the arrival of the Wuhan virus from China. I challenged parents to set aside their narcissistic paranoia over a minor respiratory infection that did not affect children and assert their responsibilities as adult guardians to demand that schools re-open immediately. I was profoundly disappointed by the largely apathetic and cowardly response shown by the vast majority of the local population.

Nearly two years later, I am done. I will no longer accept your ill-informed, foolish, immature rationalizations for the ongoing abuse of your children. If you want me to treat your child, take the mask off his face—or find another doctor who is as disturbed as you are, who prefers to cling to a fear fantasy over reality, who will rather honor a truly sinister mandate than his ethical duties, and who will choose child abuse over the uncomfortable position of embarrassing his patients. You, the parent, are not the victim. Your child is.

I have taken a stand. I invite you, too, as well. If we all do, this ends today.

Mark McDonald, M.D.
Psychiatrist and author of United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis