Fact check: Public shares false statements on masks, COVID-19 at Lee school board meeting

Parents and community members made their voices heard about what they think of requiring masks in Lee County schools.

Not everything shared during the heated public comments at Tuesday’s Lee County School Board meeting was accurate. In fact, a lot of it was misinformation about COVID-19, vaccines, and masks.

We asked experts to help us fact-check what was shared on the record at The School District of Lee County. Those experts worry popular beliefs outweigh critical facts.

Our goal is not to embarrass people who argued their beliefs during the school board meeting, only to fact-check the claims.

“Dental work will be needed because they aren’t drinking as much, and they need saliva in their mouth,” a public commenter shared with the school board.

We took comments like that to Dr. Sonja Rasmussen, a pediatrician and epidemiologist with UF, and Edwin Michaels, an epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at USF.

“You’re breathing carbon monoxide back into your body,” a public commenter said. “You’re telling me that’s healthy? You have your eyes watering up, your nose run, you get a headache. That is poisoning our children.”

“There’s no evidence of adverse effects of wearing masks,” Rasmussen said. “I do think people don’t like them. I think none of us like wearing masks. But we do it because we want to protect ourselves, and it’s really important. Right now, the delta variant is really highly transmissible, especially for people that aren’t vaccinated.”

“The better masks will prevent, you know, smaller size particles from passing through the mask, so that is well established,” Michaels said.

People commenting at the school board meeting debated how deadly COVID-19 is.

“Last flu season alone, more kids died just during flu season than have died since COVID emerged,” a public commenter said.

“That’s not true. More kids died of COVID than typically die in a year of flu. Now, last year, we had almost no deaths from flu, and that’s because kids were wearing masks,” Rasmussen said. “None of us want any child to die, and we know that, somewhere, 300 to 400 kids have died in the United States already of COVID.”