Throughout the pandemic, of all the moral outrages that our leaders have inflicted upon us and we have inflicted upon ourselves, our treatment of children surely takes the #1 spot with no close second.
The destructive business closures, the paranoia, the media malfeasance, and the transformation of our entire way of life into a never-ending bout of hypochondria—all of that is bad, yet all of it pales in comparison to what we have done to children.
We have stolen literal years of their young lives and instilled them with fear, low-grade psychosis, and crippling risk aversion – all for a virus which, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, poses a mortality risk for children approaching 0.00%.
No policy among these disgraceful failures has been more viscerally offensive than the society-wide masking of children. It is hard to imagine a rule more divorced from both practical justification and meaningful outcome. The risk that COVID presents to children is extraordinarily small, and any danger it does pose may very well be unaffected by mask-wearing.
Recent U.N. reviews, for instance, indicated that masks have minimal benefit, if any, in stopping the spread of respiratory viruses. Data cited by the U.S. government to justify the masking of schoolchildren, meanwhile, has lately been sharply and repeatedly criticized by on-the-record experts.
It is not enough to say that the crushing flaws of masking children are apparent now. It is more correct to say they were apparent two years ago. The immediate downsides of child-masking were obvious then, and the potential long-term effects of this policy were predictable and indeed forecast by a small minority of critics (many of whom were harshly censored in most media channels for their dissent).
Yet for the last roughly 24 months, we have gone full-steam ahead with this bizarre mania and we are seeing the effects of the fallout as a result:
- Huge surges in little children with speech disorders
- Teachers bullying six-year-olds who struggle to keep their masks on due to neurological disorders
- "Social and emotional side effects" the likes of which it will surely take us years if not decades to parse out.
Still, the masking persists. Major media outlets have now begun allowing gentle criticism of childhood masking after nearly two years of full-bore censorship from social media gatekeepers. That's progress... of a kind.
Yet does anybody think that the child masks are going away anytime soon? Many (if not most) teachers seem hysterically paranoid at the thought of confronting even one unmasked child. Countless parents, too, seem more than eager to strap them onto their kids as often as possible.
And as for the children? They seem resigned to them—for millions of children, wearing a wet, hot, constricting mask everywhere surely seems like just another normal part of life.
That is a failure on the part of adults who pushed this lunacy, supported it, and defended it at every opportunity.
Undoing the damage this has done is going to take us many years. It is good to see public opinion on the matter starting to shift. All we can reasonably say, though, is... what took you so long?
Where have you been for the last two years? Why have you allowed this to happen?
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