Source: Brownstone.org
Children, as any parent knows, are not small adults. Their brain is growing and being acutely shaped by their environment and experience. Social skills and values are learnt from those around them, with teamwork, risk-management, personal boundaries, and tolerance being learned through play with other children. Their immune system is imprinting environmental contact into a set of responses that will shape health in later life. Their bodies grow physically and become adept at physical skills. They learn both trust and mistrust through interaction with adults.
This rapid physical and psychological growth makes children highly vulnerable to harm. Withdrawal of close contact with trusted adults and enforced distancing has large emotional and physical impacts, in common with other primates. Lack of experience also leaves them vulnerable to manipulation by adults who are pushing certain attitudes or beliefs – often called ‘grooming.’ For these reasons, our forebears put specific protections and norms of behaviour in place that elevated the needs of children above adults.
However, protecting children did not involve enclosing them in a padded cell – policy-makers knew this to be harmful to psychological and physical development. It involved allowing children to explore their environment and society, whilst taking measures to shield them from malfeasance, including from those who would harm them directly or through ignorance or neglect.
The act of imposing risks on children for the perceived benefit of adults was therefore considered one of the worst crimes. The most cowardly use of ‘human shields.’
Article 3 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child places children at the centre of public decision-making:
“In all actions concerning children…. the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.”
When we are complicit in acts that we know are wrong, we naturally look for ways to avoid acknowledging our part in it or excuse the actions as being ‘for a greater good.’ But lying to ourselves is not a good way to correct a wrong. As we have seen in other acts of institutional child abuse, it allows the abuse to fester and expand. It advances the interests and safety of the perpetrators over that of the victims.
Covid as a means for targeting children
In early 2020, a virus outbreak was noted in Wuhan, China. It was soon clear that this relatively novel coronavirus overwhelmingly targeted the sick and elderly, particularly those on unhealthy Western diets. The Diamond Princess incident showed, however, that even among the elderly the vast majority would survive the illness (Covid-19), with many not even becoming ill.
In response, Western public health institutions, politicians, and media turned on children. Society implemented policies never seen before; a whole-of-society approach that was expected to increase poverty and inequality, particularly targeting lower-income people. and disrupt childhood development. It included restrictions on children’s play, education, and communication, and used psychological manipulation to convince them that they were a threat to their parents, teachers, and grandparents. Policies such as isolation and travel restriction, normally applied to criminals, were applied to whole populations.
The novel public health response was designed by a small but influential group of very wealthy people, often called philanthropists, and international institutions which they have funded and co-opted over the past decade. These same people would go on to be greatly enriched through the ensuing response. Encouraged by these same but now even wealthier people governments are now working to entrench these responses to build a poorer, less free and more unequal world into which all children will grow.
Whilst rarely discussed in public spaces, strategies of targeting and sacrificing children for the gratification of adults are not new. However, it is a practice that normally elicits disgust. We can now understand better, having been part of it, how such actions can creep into a society and become integral to its character. People find it easy to condemn the past, whilst excusing the present; asking reparations for past slavery whilst advocating for cheaper batteries produced through current child slavery, or condemning past institutionalized child abuse whilst condoning it when it happens within their own institutions. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not asking us to look to the past, but to the present. The most mature society is one that can face itself, calmly and with its eyes open.
The abandonment of evidence
Aerosolized respiratory viruses, such as coronaviruses, spread in tiny airborne particles over long distances and are not interrupted by cloth face coverings or surgical masks. This has been long- established and has been confirmed again by the US CDC in a meta-analysis of influenza studies published in May 2020.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus was somewhat unusual (though not unique) in its targeting of a cell receptor in the lining of the respiratory tract, ACE-2 receptors, to enter and infect cells. These are expressed less in children, meaning children are intrinsically less likely to be severely infected or transmit large viral loads to others. This explains the study outcomes early in the Covid-19 epidemic that demonstrated very low transmission from children to school teachers, and adults living with children having a lower-than-average risk. It explains why Sweden, following former evidence-based recommendations from the World Health Organization (WHO), kept schools open with no ill effects on health….