Great Barrington Declaration co-author Jay Bhattacharya, writing in the Wall Street Journal, justly decries the mindless masking of children and the Orwellian muzzling of dissenting scientific voices on Covid-19. A slice:
Consider also data from Sweden, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in February. Swedish primary schools have been open for in-person instruction throughout the epidemic, no masks required, even when cases were increasing. Of more than 1.8 million children in school in spring 2020 ages 1 through 15, not one died from Covid-19. This study also showed that teachers were at low risk for Covid; they contracted the disease at rates lower than the average of other Swedish essential workers.
But the evidence is overwhelming that masking can harm children’s developmental progress. Look at the World Health Organization’s guidance document on child masking, which says that up to age 5 masking children may harm the achievement of childhood developmental milestones. For children between 6 and 11, the same document says that mask guidance should consider the “potential impact of mask-wearing on learning and psychosocial development.” The WHO explicitly recommends against masks during exercise because masks make breathing more difficult.
The WHO recommends against masking children 5 and under and only tepidly recommends masking children between 6 and 11. My reading of the same evidence comes down definitively against masking children up to 11. My colleagues in the Florida roundtable agreed; so do many other doctors, scientists and epidemiologists. This sort of disagreement based on the weight of evidence is common in scientific policy; I place an enormous value on children flourishing.
My colleague Bryan Caplan offers here a hypothetical for the ages.
David Henderson sensibly asks: “Is Fauci that ignorant?” (DBx: ‘That ignorant’? – Almost surely. ‘That mad for celebrity and inflated self-importance’? – Without question.)
Jordan Schachtel wonders if there is any longer a free world.
Jonathon Riley decries the brave new world created by the Covidocracy. Two slices:
Why are they doing this? The discredited Professor Neil Ferguson’s interview with the Times provided one clue. They did it because they could. ‘Sage … had watched as China enacted this innovate (sic) intervention in pandemic control that was also a medieval intervention … Sage debated whether … it could be effective here.
‘It (China) is a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought … and then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’
…..
It all reminds me forcibly of conditions under communism in Eastern Europe before 1989. It is hard not to conclude either that the vaccine is ineffective and the continuation of restrictions is to disguise this, along with the enormous sums of money being made from it; or that regardless of its effectiveness, the vaccine is simply another control measure designed to instil fear and compliance.
And do not doubt that the Covidocracy is real, at least in Britain. A slice:
Last week, the Government launched its new UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).
Billed as ‘combining key elements of Public Health England with NHS Test and Trace, including the Joint Biosecurity Centre’, it would be easy to dismiss this as a sort of tidying-up process, bringing together the different government agencies that have formed part of its response to Covid.
But for those of us who have been deeply troubled by the interventions of government, this new department represents the realisation of what we always feared: The institutionalisation of a kind of health fascism.
At the heart of the problem lies the assumption that illness presents a security risk. We have seen this principle underpin government policy throughout and it has been used to justify some of the most restrictive, illiberal measures our country has ever seen.
The use of a lockdown in itself speaks of an assumed security threat, as this strategy was previously only associated with prisons, to control rioting inmates.
The Covidocracy is real also in Australia.
