Kids belong in school

Vincent J. Curtis

30 Dec 21

RE: Nervous families waiting on plan for return to school. Canadian Press news article by Holly McKenzie-Sutter.  Published in the Hamilton Spectator 30 Dec 21.

One of the cardinal principles of public health, all health really, is that it is a totality.  It’s not just one thing.  A person dying of cancer isn’t healthy because they’re free of COVID.  Likewise, other public health issues, both mental and physical, don’t go away because the world is possessed by a pandemic.  Public health measures can, in these circumstances, became a balancing act, trying to optimize and achieve a least-bad outcome.

The single-minded devotion to dealing with the COVID pandemic has violated this cardinal principle of public health.  Being COVID-free isn’t the beginning and end of public health.  Kids need to be in school for a variety of health reasons, and that includes learning to be social as well as education.  Keeping kids out of school because of the pandemic has been an educational disaster, and everybody knows it.

The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (so named because it was declared in Great Barrington, USA) put it this way:

“Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.”

“We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.” 

“The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits… is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally …”

“Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home.”

We’ve known since March, 2020, that COVID was dangerous primarily to those over eighty years, while those under twenty were practically unaffected by it.  We now have the data to show that the ordinary seasonal flu is more dangerous to kids than COVID.  We also know that in kids, symptoms are mild, and that kids tend to get COVID from adults, but transmission the other way around is rare.  We also know that transmission occurs most commonly in the home.

School is the safe place for kids to be, if you are concerned about COVID.  School is the healthy place for kids to be, and they don’t need masks or plastic barriers, or anything else.  In Europe, COVID was never allowed to interfere with kids going to school.

Why our public health officials are unaware of this is one reason I question their competence.

How we reached the Pavlovian response of rising cases demands lockdowns is described by Dr. Scott Atlas in his new book A Plague upon our House.  The main culprits were Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who were two of the alleged medical experts on Vice President Mike Pence’s special COVID advisory committee.  Both Birx and Fauci were virologists, not epidemiologists, and when you’re a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.  Birx especially violated President Trump’s policy that “the cure can’t be worse than the disease,” and she pursued her personal, single-minded crusade for lockdowns.  Amazingly, Fauci did and said little at committee.  He read no academic papers, knew little of the data, and simply backed Birx up at committee.  He spent a considerable amount of time in front of TV cameras, however.  Atlas was brought in because he was a public health policy expert who opposed lockdowns and knew the data cold; and his colleagues, some of whom authored the Great Barrington Declaration, were epidemiologists.

By the time Atlas joined the committee in July, 2020, the damage was done, and a Birx’s lockdown mentality possessed both the media and most blue-state governors.  The great exception was Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who contacted Atlas in April, 2020, and pursued a different course that kept Florida largely open and was not suffering COVID deaths any worse than comparable locked-down blue states.  DeSantis was attacked viciously in the press.

What was done in America was copied in Canada for fear of looking out of step like Ron DeSantis  Politicians especially did not want the treatment DeSantis was getting, in part to my mind, because they lacked the mental power to fight back as DeSantis did quite effectively.  I can’t imaging Premier Doug Ford lecturing a media hack in the masterful way that DeSantis can.

By the deer-in-the-headlights look in their eyes, you can tell that the major public health officials in Canada don’t really understand their jobs or know the science, because they lack the academic training of people like Dr. Scott Atlas, and they aren’t smart enough to talk to him.  Atlas’ great criticism of Birx, Fauci, and others is that they lack the critical thinking required to understand what the data is telling them, and they don’t read the scientific papers, period.  Likely the same thing is happening in Canada.

If Ontario schools don’t re-open in January, or get closed later, it demonstrates how hopeless Ontario public health officials really are.  All but a few know that lockdown is bad, but they lack the stomach to take on the dangerous and really stupid fanatics like Dr. Adalsteinn Brown.  Dr. Kieran Moore’s recent announcement of lockdown-lite demonstrates to me that he still doesn’t get it, and I have questions for him to answer in another posting.

We’ll know soon enough the depth of the mental rot in Ontario public health and other officials soon enough.

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