The CDC’s toddler school-masking guidance “is completely insane,” Emily Oster explains at The Atlantic. Yes, “hospitalization rates are higher for the 0-to-4 group than for the 5–19 age group” but that’s “driven by children younger than 1, who are more likely to be hospitalized . . . in general.” Nor does it matter “the under-5 cohort is ineligible for vaccines”: “In New York, less than half of the 5-to-11 group is vaccinated,” yet they’re all unmasked. Plus, “a recent study out of Spain” found “no difference” in spread between “unmasked 5-year-olds” and “masked 6-year-olds” while “unmasked 3- and 4-year-olds saw the lowest spread.” Worse, “The possible costs of continued mask wearing may be the largest for the very cohort still subject to mandates,” so “The continued masking of toddlers as we unmask everyone else is not justifiable.”

President Biden once claimed Clarence Thomas is a Supreme Court justice “because he’s black,” recalls The Wall Street Journal’s Jason L. Riley. Now Joe’s tapped Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson after explicitly vowing to nominate a black woman. Yet such preferences only “diminish black achievement”: “Blacks were advancing at a fast clip, both educationally and economically,” before affirmative action; at best, preferences “continued” the trend. Yet questioning Jackson’s “judicial philosophy would be far more constructive than questioning her qualifications”: She seems to have “more sympathy for criminals” than victims, though minorities “are more likely” to be “targets of violent crime.”

“If you were in the same position as Ukrainians are now, do you think that you would stay and fight or leave the country?” asked a new Quinnipiac poll. Since “Americans are relatively patriotic,” Timothy P. Carney writes at the Washington Examiner, most said yes. But while “68% of Republicans said stay and fight, as did 57% of independents,” just “40% of Democrats said they would take up arms to defend the country from an invading force.” Sad. But “Democratic millennials and Zoomers don’t think Americans are good. They don’t think humans are good, for that matter.”

Putin’s war “is starting to resemble the first Russian invasion of Chechnya,” notes TK News’ Matt Taibbi, when they “ended up having to vaporize virtually” all of Grozny “after taking heavy losses following a disastrous New Year’s Eve assault.” Now, in Ukraine, Putin is similarly “reorganizing, adopting a more brutal strategy. . . . It will just take longer, and cost more in lives, to get to the same place.” The disaster has longtime Putin-watchers questioning his rationality, yet the West is seeing its own lunacy as Twitter opts to suppress any post that “spreads news that ‘that Ukraine isn’t doing well’ ” and posturing extends to “The International Cat Federation banning Russian cats” as others equate dissent with treason and demand risky interventions. “The goal of humanity should be to keep this war as small as possible, but the dominant idea sounds like embracing the bigness of it, and expanding the fight in every direction, from Kyiv to London to the guy tweeting in the next cubicle to that guy’s friends and beyond.”

“New Pfizer data kills the case for universal child COVID vaccines,” concludes Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at UnHerd. In a study tracking New York state children as Omicron hit, vaccine efficacy against infection among older kids “dropped from 76% in the first two weeks after full inoculation to 46% a month later.” For younger children, “It dropped from 65% in the first two weeks to negative efficacy: -41% a month later.” Yes, vaxxed young’uns “were actually more likely to be infected than unvaccinated kids” six weeks after the jab. And since the jab “can produce negative side effects,” it clearly should be used “on children with specific health needs” — not mandated for every child.

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board