Robert Malone on children: what the evidence says · JRE #1757
SUBJECT: CHILDREN
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
We are having a huge surge of drug abuse in adolescents. We're having demonstrable drops in IQ and fundamental developmental milestones in the very young, like 20 IQ points.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Malone's claim traces to a widely publicized Brown University study (Deoni et al.) that compared cognitive test scores (Mullen Scales of Early Learning) in infants and toddlers born during 2020-2021 against a pre-pandemic historical cohort from 2011-2019 and reported significantly lower verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance in the pandemic-born group; this research was presented as a conference abstract and posted as a preprint but was never published as a full peer-reviewed paper, and it did not isolate mask-wearing or lockdowns as causes, instead attributing findings to broad pandemic-era environmental disruption. No study has documented a population-wide 20-point IQ drop specifically linked to masks or lockdown policy. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of ten studies across six countries, published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, found no statistically significant difference in overall child development between pre-pandemic and pandemic-era cohorts (pooled Cohen's d = 0.28, p = 0.18), though it did find a significant, smaller effect specific to language and communication delays. Current evidence therefore supports modest, domain-specific developmental effects, particularly in language, rather than the large, generalized "20 IQ point" drop described in the claim.