@islockdownoveryet Sorry to hear your son has difficulties. I used to work in a brilliant school for special needs children, and campaign and do voluntary work for disabilities of all kinds. As you see in my post, I reported the words of the t.v. doctor, and the added sentence about some, rare, people who genuinely could not wear masks.
Very reasonably, you mention that you do not insist on taking your unmasked DS out and about constantly in close proximity with the public. You have made a couple of exceptions, but I hope you will agree that although your own DS has not, necessarily, got heightened physical risk, other people, of all ages, do.
That g.p. may have been thinking of patients who came into her surgery. She said every one wore a mask and she couldn't think why any would not, but the extra vulnerable would have been under self imposed solitary confinement, rightly scared to go out while public places are filled with aggressive non-mask wearers.
Is permanent solitary confinement for life, for those thousands living alone, a fair price to pay for those who demand a lovely time getting drunk in close proximity with strangers at the club or the pub, or sitting on public transport, or going round shopping centres and supermarkets, and all without wearing a mask? One of these bullies, in a hundred thousand, might have a condition like your son..... but I doubt it, don't you? The asthmatics I know are the most eager to keep covered, because they are vulnerable. They would prefer to have someone else bring their shopping while an attack is near, and only go out in the intervals when breathing through a mask is possible.
Pandemic risk is like climate emergency. It won't all be over soon, or ever. This isn't going away. 2023 was the most optimistic time when W.H.O. had hoped worldwide covid19 could be 'over', but news now confirms there is no such thing as immunity. In fact, having it once is now known to very soon lose any degree of immunity gained, and the second time infections are worse than the first, and more likely to have fatal or permanent effects.
A normal lifestyle of mask wearing has been commonplace, every-day habit for many years, in the Far East, where they have already been accustomed to a permanent lifestyle of being extra careful of repeated major virus attacks. Swine flu, Asian flu, Spanish flu, Ebola, Plague, and more, have swept through communities and spread to other countries, especially with mass migration and encouragement of non essential travel.
None have entirely vanished from the earth, and all can mutate, and entirely new ones can arise at any time on top of the others. Even T.B., which was a major killer eliminated from U.K., has sprung up again. Permanently living in ways to avoid disease spread is the only viable way to re-arrange our lifestyles. That will have to be the normal situation everywhere in the world, in the new reality.
There is straight choice between every vulnerable person (millions) enduring permanent imprisonment in solitary confinement, or, on the other hand, a small belligerent element (not you, I hasten to add) being given the 'free pass' of being able to yell the word "exempt", and, under that fake cover, using their self awarded right to do anything they damwell like, fists clenched, and not care how many other people die as a result .
A ban on bare faces would have deprived your DS of the two exceptional outings you mention, and you are the world expert on how to please him, but isn't it possible you might have found ways he could do something equally enjoyable to him, but away from proximity with strangers, or by staying in familiar surroundings?
A permission for just one person to go bare-faced, on the other hand, has been abused as the open gateway for the worst elements among the hard of thinking, beating up and even stabbing and coughing in the faces of innocent people, even one local spitting in the face of someone's baby, as a punishment for the mum wearing a mask, which offended his opinion there is no such thing as Covid19 .