It is now an incontrovertible fact that closing or opening schools had zero bearing on the course of the pandemic or the safety of children who were never at an elevated risk from this pandemic. It’s clear from schools reopening during the worst Delta wave with no extra repercussions that all of the academic, mental health, physical health, and behavior development problems we foisted upon the children were absolutely senseless. This, despite the fact that so many of us knew this for months on end, but our cries fell on deaf ears.
Any thinking person should be asking: If the governing elites were this wrong for so long on earlier pandemic decisions, with such devastating consequences, why are we taking their word as gospel now when they push endless boosters of an unsafe shot and block other therapeutics? At some point, there needs to be accountability.
To implement such policy chemotherapy as shutting down schools indefinitely, one would have to cough up an insurmountable degree of evidence showing severe consequences of not shutting them down. Yet, from day one, not only was there no evidence that children were in danger themselves or a danger to others simply by remaining in school, but there were mountains of evidence to the contrary.
Back on May 4, 2020, I wrote my first piece on schools, noting that “closing schools was the biggest mistake of this lockdown,” and presented numerous data points showing that there is only harm and no benefit from the policy. Yet it took months for most Republican governors to get on board and over a year for many blue-state governors to follow suit. We will never recover the generational loss from that shutdown. Yet it wasn’t a “one and done” policy. Every day following late March 2020 was another opportunity to follow the truth and reopen schools. They could have fully opened schools normally at any time, yet they failed to do it.
We saw early on that not a single child in Sweden died when all the primary school children remained in session without masks. Another Swedish study observed, “There was no additional household risk for those over 70 in Stockholm associated with co-residing with children still in school during the pandemic.”
Eventually, when nearly all the schools opened in September for the 2021-2022 academic year, after having parts of two years destroyed, there was no noticeable increase in community transmission. This, despite the reopening coinciding with the worst Delta spread and hospitalizations among adults. A peer-reviewed study published in the Lancet noted, “Infection rates in school-based contacts were low, with very few school contacts testing positive.”
A study of nearly 18,000 students in 77 schools in Marin County, California, concluded, “Returning to in-person school did not drive an increased COVID-19 case rate in the community. On the contrary … there was a drop in countywide COVID-19 cases as the phased student return percentage increased.” Even a writer at the Atlantic conceded, “Looking at the state-by-state data, you’d be hard-pressed to find bumps that can be pinned on the beginning of the semester. Last year, no surge happened in September either. … Schools aren’t the problem. They never have been.”
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