I had to read this twice. Did a feminist really write this? Did a liberal really write this? Did the San Francisco Chronicle really publish this? Yes—and it's prime material to get the woke mob all huffy. The issue about COVID, masks, and schools continues to be an issue for liberal America. They want masks all the time, among other things. What is clear is that it’s screwing up kids. You all know this—the mental health crisis that will result of the adults overreacting to a virus with a 99-plus percent survival rate will last for generations. It’s not reported often since it chips away at the liberal media’s fear narrative, but kids are committing suicide. Anxiety and depression have reached historic highs among these demographics—and no one seems to care. We have fake news stories about hospitals packed with kids infected with COVID. Not true. It’s also not true that COVID has killed scores of kids either. Around 900 kids have died from the virus since the start of the pandemic. It’s no less tragic, but it puts things into perspective concerning risk. If we’re so worried about COVID deaths among kids, where was the outrage when 200-1,200 of them died every year from the flu.
These are some of the points Jennifer Block cited in her op-ed. Block is a liberal writer and feminist. She was an editor for Ms. Magazine. She’s had her work published in The Nation, Mother Jones, Slate, Jezebel, Huffington Post, The Guardian, and Elle. She has a book calling for a feminist revolution in the health care industry. She’s a hardcore liberal, which is why such a piece could make her a prime target for cancellation. She made a level-headed swipe at the COVID insanity at our schools. She also primed it with a nice analysis of the insanity that’s come from the Left when the experts deliver ‘good news’ about COVID. She also included what her young son brought home that made her question the current COVID regime in the education system (via SF Chronicle):
The recent attempt by director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, to frame risk landed her in similar cancellation territory. On “Good Morning America” on Jan. 7, she called it “really encouraging news” that the majority of COVID-19 deaths are concentrated among people with several comorbidities (obviously not encouraging for those who have them) and for her insensitivity, was called a eugenicist.
Somehow, the conversation we should be having about how we can move forward with a virus that became uncontrollable and inescapable has turned into a referendum on equity: If you accept the inevitability of infections, you must not care about the people who will suffer most.
Walensky’s point should not have been controversial: Some people are at higher risk than others — from early on, data has shown that the risk of death increases by orders of magnitude with age and disease. That has bearing on public health policy and how people live their lives: some may want to take more precautions than others. Similarly, the physicians urging a return to normal are valiantly trying to give us some perspective, to contextualize how extremely tiny the risk of COVID is for children, much lower than the risks most families take every day and equivalent to the risk of flu we all lived with maskless before COVID.
Meanwhile, kids are bearing the brunt of restrictions: all-day masking and “punitive mask culture,” as one of the many physicians speaking out recently put it; disruption to their social and emotional learning, to literacy and speech, and worrisome impacts on their mental health. My 8-year-old son brought home a self-portrait this week — it had no nose or mouth.
Should little humans see each other’s faces and see their teachers’ faces? If our answer is “yes, but not until everyone is safe,” we need to put some numbers behind that rhetoric. In every recent winter except the last, between 200 and 1,200 kids in the U.S. died of the flu, the physicians point out. During the entire pandemic, some 900 deaths of children are attributed to COVID. Any death of a young person is achingly tragic. But when will all children be “safe”?
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We have to ask: How have so many European countries managed to keep kids in school and barefaced and their death rates lower than ours?
In evidence-based medicine, the burden of proof is on the intervention, not the norm. The norm is seeing human faces. The intervention is endless masking. We should have better studies by now to inform recommendations, but at the very least we need open dialogue.
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The goal of “ending COVID” was once laudable, but at this point it’s driven by a mixture of naivete, hubris and entitlement. We can all be furious and devastated by the death and illness this virus is still causing, but we can’t misread people’s desire for normal as indicating callous disregard for human life. One of the first rules of parenting is to never take out your own anger on your children. That’s what turns us into monsters.
That’s right. Read the whole piece, but I agreed with nearly every word of it. The canary in the coalmine here is that any call to ‘return to normal’ will be met with liberal America’s favorite attack line: you’re racist. The ‘urgency for equity’ will be the new saber-rattling cry when these draconian measures are rolled back. Racist, ableist, classist—these are the terms to get familiar with soon. Returning to normal is white supremacy, says the rich white liberals who only whine about fake problems all day. If anything, that’s the epitome of…privilege.
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