Based on the assertions you were making above, I was expecting the study you linked to have to do with cognitive impairment and masks. Its only discussion of masks is a theory that perhaps the fact that test administrators wearing masks might have affected the measurement of the results.
"Although all study visits were performed in-person, the inability of infants to see full facial expressions may have eliminated non-verbal cues, muffled instructions, or otherwise impair the understanding of test questions and instructions. Without direct comparison of performance in the same children with and without face masks, it is difficult to rule in or out the potential influence of masks."
How does that compares to the kind of cognitive problems created by long covid, i.e. riveted to the bed and/or unable to read/concentrate/think ever again, etc?
Have you seen what happened to Physics Girl? (and she was vaccinated, but still the likelyhood to get it would have been ever greater without the vaccine)
To lower the proba of getting that, I would eagerly accept any gap in the development of my facial recognition abilities.
It's not news that not seeing faces impedes face skills learning... I'd have guessed it anyways.
It's just not at all the same scale of cognitive damage. On one hand (covid) you get quite a brain substance loss (aka premature brain aging), on the other hand a skill is defavored (faces) which the brain is always happy to compensate with skills about other stuff.
So yeah, in a population that is leaning to believe that covid vaccines have 5G chips in it... you have to select the most important bits of science to know for the emergency, and spend all the time and energy in pedagogy on that. Not really worth to do this kind of effusive pedagogy about why not seeing faces impedes becoming good at faces.
Cognitive problems from masks???
LOL. You are making this up.