Fox News promoted a study warning about kids wearing masks — but it just got retracted by a medical journal

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has killed more than 4 million people worldwide and over 608,000 people in the United States (according to researchers at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University), the right-wing media continue to promote a variety of anti-vaccine and anti-mask views. Fox News' website, on July 2, published an article by health reporter Kayla Rivas promoting a claim that wearing protective face masks is potentially dangerous for children. This But a medical journal has since retracted that claim.

The research letter that Rivas' article linked to was published on the JAMA Network's website on June 30. It suggested that kids wearing masks inhaled unhealthy levels of carbon dioxide. Host Tucker Carlson also promoted the study's claims on his primetime show.

Promoting a claim that wearing masks is potentially dangerous for children is the type of red meat that Fox News' audience devours, and being scientific often takes a back seat to "owning the liberals." But this week, JAMA retracted the letter that Rivas promoted.

The retraction reads, "Following publication, numerous scientific issues were raised regarding the study methodology, including concerns about the applicability of the device used for assessment of carbon dioxide levels in this study setting, and whether the measurements obtained accurately represented carbon dioxide content in inhaled air, as well as issues related to the validity of the study conclusions. In their invited responses to these and other concerns, the authors did not provide sufficiently convincing evidence to resolve these issues, as determined by editorial evaluation and additional scientific review. Given fundamental concerns about the study methodology, uncertainty regarding the validity of the findings and conclusions, and the potential public health implications, the editors have retracted this Research Letter."

Dr. Megan Ranney, a doctor at Brown Emergency in Providence, Rhode Island, saw the retraction and tweeted:

Here are some Twitter responses to the retraction: