In the spring of 2020, while American schools stayed shut, Denmark sent children back after six weeks. Norway did the same. Sweden never closed primary schools at all. Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg watched it happen in real time: on TV, through family in Scandinavia, and in the public data, and kept asking the same question: why weren’t we seeing this?
This week on the Restore Childhood Podcast I sat down with Tracy, a physician epidemiologist and former acting director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. We talked about the European school data that never fully reached the U.S., the thin evidence behind masking children, how anyone can spot stronger research from weaker research, and the lasting damage school closures left behind. Children are still living with the consequences. Almost no one has faced a real reckoning.
Tracy and I worked together on Urgency of Normal in late 2021 and early 2022 when we pushed to unmask kids in schools. She’s also one of the clearest voices in 15 DAYS, our documentary on America’s pandemic school closures.
Watch or listen to the full conversation in the player above. The quotes and takeaways below are the highlights; the complete context and details are in the episode.
“There was no increase in community case rates”
Tracy described the spring of 2020 as two parallel worlds. In Denmark, Norway, and much of Europe, primary schools reopened relatively quickly. Adults and teachers focused on getting kids back to routines. Outdoor options (Scout clubhouses, Tivoli Gardens) were used creatively, then kids moved back indoors. Public data showed no clear rise in community cases tied to those reopenings.
By early June 2020 a Sweden-Finland comparison was available: Sweden kept primary schools open; Finland closed them. No meaningful difference appeared in case rates among children or teachers, or in hospitalizations. Tracy started posting the European data on Facebook because almost no one in the U.S. was talking about it. Those posts spread widely among parents. Months later the Great Barrington Declaration arrived; she had already been making the school-reopening case publicly.
She later advised a Sacramento diocese that reopened full-time in August 2020 (technically as daycares to work around state rules) using a protocol based on the Danish approach. Her own children attended one of those schools that fall.
Masking children had almost no good evidence
Tracy notes that Scandinavian countries never masked young children and often barred teachers from wearing masks so kids could see faces and hear speech. Friends there who supported adult masking thought the U.S. approach was absurd.
A Cochrane review of randomized studies found no clear benefit from mask mandates or community masking. The CDC published dozens of MMWR studies on masks; none supported causal claims that masks reduced infections, yet most still asserted or implied that they did. In the Wood County, Wisconsin study (published in MMWR) that Tracy co-authored, transmission was extremely low among more than 5,000 students and staff. The CDC wanted a concluding statement about the importance of masking children. Tracy and co-authors pushed back (there was no control group, kids weren’t masking at lunch or outdoors, and European data looked similar without masks), and the sentence was removed.
“The whole thing was such a moral and ethical failure of adults… so many adults, on some level, knew better… And yet people were so unwilling to step up… because they were so concerned about their own careers and their own reputations.”
Censorship for posting CDC data
Tracy says she was not heavily censored early on. That changed in 2021. She was restricted on Facebook for posting CDC data and on Twitter (then) for sharing a CDC slide on myocarditis rates in adolescent boys after the Pfizer vaccine versus expected background rates. She noted it looked like a real safety signal and questioned whether two doses clearly outweighed harms in healthy boys. The post was briefly restricted; Tucker Carlson later featured it.
How to tell stronger research from weaker research
After her time inside the FDA, Tracy’s practical advice for non-experts is straightforward:
Prefer randomized trials when judging whether something works. Random assignment reduces the bias that plagues most observational studies (people who choose masks, boosters, or certain diets differ in many other ways from those who don’t).
Observational data can sometimes support safety signals when an event is rare and appears at a very high multiple of background rates right after an exposure (myocarditis after mRNA vaccination in young males is her frequent example).
Watch for funding bias, post-hoc analyses, publication bias, and selective reporting. Raw data and preprints can help; peer review is not a perfect filter.
Ask concrete questions: number needed to treat to prevent one hospitalization or death, absolute risk differences, and what the highest-quality (ideally randomized) evidence actually shows.
She also notes that AI tools can help patients surface better studies and prepare questions for their doctors, but only if the user knows to prioritize higher-quality evidence.
No reckoning
School closures, prolonged masking of children, and the broader disruption of normal life for kids produced measurable harm (learning loss, chronic absenteeism, developmental setbacks) while the original justifications rested on weak or nonexistent evidence for those specific policies. Tracy argues the medical and academic communities largely failed to push back when it mattered most. Strength in numbers (Urgency of Normal and similar efforts) eventually helped, but the window for preventing the damage had already closed.
Tracy is now back in clinical practice as an interventional spine physician in the Sacramento and Bay Area, seeing patients of all ages. She is not currently doing research but has not ruled it out.
Key takeaways
Multiple European countries reopened schools after roughly six weeks (or never closed primary schools) with no clear increase in community transmission linked to the reopenings.
Evidence that masking children reduced COVID transmission was extremely weak; Scandinavian countries largely rejected the practice for young children.
Tracy was restricted online for sharing CDC data on myocarditis rates in adolescent boys.
For efficacy questions, randomized trials are generally far more reliable than observational studies.
The lasting harms of school closures to children have not been met with a serious public reckoning.
Listen to the full episode for the complete conversation, including Tracy’s account of the Wood County study, the details of her FDA time, her thoughts on the current plague reports out of Russia (and the Malone posts she recommends), and more.
