Horowitz: Schoolchildren's lives have been destroyed. Any lessons learned?



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.”

Again, it’s OK to forge a policy based on a mistaken assumption for a few days. After all, we have all made mistakes, and we are not exactly used to dealing with bioweapon viruses created from gain-of-function research by some of the same powers behind the school shutdowns! However, what is not OK is to persist in those views for months on end after the collateral damage became clear and the initial evidence of zero benefit to the policy kept being reinforced every day.

A recent report in Maryland found that just 15% of all Maryland public school students passed math and just 35% passed English in the state’s standardized testing this year, the greatest single-year decline of any state test in two decades. As the Capital Gazette reports, “The declines were worse among students who had been out of in-person school for the longest. Schools in Maryland were some of the last in the country to return to in-person learning.”

My mother taught second grade in a Maryland private school that was only closed for the end of the 2019-2020 academic year. Yet even there, she found the students to be off the wall during the following academic year, to the point that she chose early retirement. There are still many public schools throughout the country where the kids are being forced to cover their breathing all day and eat lunch in the freezing cold outside. In fact, some schools are still forcing masks even outside, despite outdoor transmission being debunked early on in the pandemic.

This will quite literally take years off lives the lives of our children. The University of California published a study in JAMA estimating a cumulative loss of 5.53 million life years from this generation of children due to lost educational attainment.

Now that we are at a crossroads with a virus that clearly is not responding to the shots and there are so many safety signals indicating widespread injuries, how can we allow these policies to continue? Whether it’s the coerced or pressured shots, the denial of lifesaving early treatment, or the continued use of remdesivir, it’s not the mistakes of this pandemic that make the response so criminal but the persistence of doubling down on them, even after the truth has become undeniably clear.

Squires: Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice are criminalizing parenting



The Biden administration wants to make parents who resist activist educators into domestic terrorists because the left is losing its grip on American children.

The National School Board Association (NSBA) wrote a six-page letter to the Biden administration claiming that public schools and education leaders are being threatened with acts of violence and intimidation at local school board meetings. The NSBA requested federal law enforcement assistance in dealing with frustrated parents they claim are angry about mask mandates, critical race theory (CRT), and online learning. The organization even suggested that these threats could be a new form of domestic terrorism. Its letter questioned whether the PATRIOT Act and federal hate crime legislation could be used to rein in unruly parents.

This week the Department of Justice (DOJ) responded. Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI and U.S. attorneys to meet with state, local, and tribal leaders and law enforcement agencies to discuss the threats. I read the NSBA letter and the DOJ memo. They use the words violence, threat, and intimidation over 60 times. The most serious physical act of aggression I found was a man who was charged with aggravated battery and disorderly conduct after allegedly striking a school official who attempted to escort him out of a meeting. The other incidents described in the letter were of angry parents who disrupted meetings and yelled at board members.

What is happening here is clear. The federal government is taking its first steps to turn concerned parents into its newest thought criminals. This isn't the first time. The Department of Homeland Security issued a terror advisory, absent any imminent threats or plots, in September that NBC claimed was based on a rise in "anti-government rhetoric." The list of potential terror suspects included people who believed there was fraud in the 2020 election as well as Americans opposed to COVID mandates. Using the resources and might of the federal government to go after citizens based solely on their political beliefs is a recipe for disaster that will only further inflame political tensions.

This attempt to flex federal muscle is even worse because there is nothing parents care about more than the well-being of their children. School districts across the country have become even bolder in their desire to imprint their views and values on students. They are assigning sexually explicit books to young students, promoting gender ideology and socially transitioning gender-confused children behind the backs of their parents, and promoting regressive views on race. They are also masking children as young as three, even though the World Health Organization states that children who are five years old and under should not be required to wear masks.

The real problem for many of these educators is the fact that many parents are finally waking up and exerting their authority over the education of their children. This is one reason why there has been such a rapid increase in homeschooling — from 3% to 11% of American families — over the past year. Regardless of your religious background or moral foundation, you must realize that education is equal parts scholarship and discipleship. It is never value-neutral. This is why the following Bible verse is so important to me.

"The student is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher." —Luke 6:40

Parents are delusional if they think the few hours they have with their kids before and after school are any match for the 18,000 hours their children will spend in school from kindergarten through 12th grade. This is why so many parents have experienced the disappointment that comes with pouring your values into a child for 18 years only to have them come home hating everything they've ever been taught after one year on a college campus.

We can already see what happens when absolute truth is abandoned for elite consensus. No issue makes that clearer than the ongoing debate about sex, gender, and gender identity. Every organ of cultural hegemony in this country, from advocacy media companies like the New York Times to all of the big tech platforms, is in complete lockstep with the idea that people other than women can get pregnant. These gatekeepers sound, act, and behave like Romans because they have all been trained since childhood by Caesar. They claim to know the precise efficacy of masks against a respiratory virus, but don't seem to understand the most basic fact of human biology.

Our public schools do not educate children. They teach them conformity. That reality has been made worse over the last decade as schools that can't teach children how to read and write have shifted their focus to creating loyal voters who dutifully repeat talking points. Millions of students participated in online learning last year due to the pandemic, and many parents finally got to see what their children were being exposed to at school. That is why so many are fed up and starting to make their frustrations known.

We are not in a co-parenting relationship with the federal government, and the Constitution does not give the government jurisdiction over our children. Parents are tired of seeing radical activists masquerade as educators. I hope they continue to fight for their children. There is no hill more worthy of dying on.

Horowitz: A freedom spring after the dark winter of tyranny?



It's not just when you're having fun that time flies. I can't believe it's nearly 11 months since my first article noting that locking down and masking children is a crime against humanity divorced from all science. Yet here we are almost a year later, entering a new spring season, with children being forced to mask in school (assuming they are even in school) and being wrongly treated as vectors of spread rather than the future of our country. The consequences are unfathomable and will plague us for years to come.

Last week, CBC News reported that McMaster Children's Hospital in Hamilton, Ontario, saw a 90% increase in children admitted for eating disorders, along with a tripling of children patients admitted after suicide attempts over a four-month period.

The culprit? A "lack of social interaction, increased conflict at home, and the inability to rely on friends as main contributors."

As a result, the hospital has also seen double the admissions for drug-related psychosis.

Sadly, there is nothing unique to Canada. It's occurring everywhere in the world where children were shut out of school and where adults selfishly projected their own fears upon children. In places like Los Alamos, New Mexico, emergency responders saw a tripling of suicides during the first eight months of the lockdowns. In August, the CDC reported that 25% of young adults considered suicide, yet the agency has failed to fundamentally change its policies in the ensuing months.

It didn't have to be this way. Even if one agreed with the unprecedented masking and social isolation of adults, the science was clear from day one that children were less at risk either to get sick from or to spread the virus than from typical seasonal pathogens. We could have left children alone to live much of their normal lives and routines.

Ironically, in September 2019, just months before the coronavirus outbreak became apparent in Wuhan, Johns Hopkins wrote a paper for the World Health Organization gaming out "Preparedness for a High-Impact Respiratory Pathogen Pandemic." Hopkins, which became a leading voice for lockdowns just a few months later, warned about the severe consequences of "non-pharmaceutical interventions" (NPIs).

"During an emergency, it should be expected that implementation of some NPIs, such as travel restrictions and quarantine, might be pursued for social or political purposes by political leaders, rather than pursued because of public health evidence," warned the team from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. "WHO should rapidly and clearly articulate its opposition to inappropriate NPIs, especially when they threaten public health response activities or pose increased risks to the health of the public."

Well, several months later, those political NPIs are exactly what Hopkins recommended. Officials destroyed the health of a generation of children, all for politics, when they knew from day one that this virus was not a danger to children. The evidence from day one showed lockdowns of children would be all pain and no gain, yet Hopkins refused to heed its own advice from September 2019.

"It is necessary to further study the effectiveness of NPIs in a variety of contexts to ensure that they are employed properly with a strong evidence base, and that the value of taking any specific NPI intervention in a particular pandemic setting is not outweighed by the potential harm," warned the authors, prophetically. "It is important to communicate to political leaders the absence of evidence surrounding many NPI interventions and the adverse consequences that may follow them."

To this day, we never hear a word from people like Anthony Fauci or CDC Director Rochelle Walensky about the negative consequences of COVID cult-like living on children or anyone else. In fact, this is not even a case of the consequences outweighing the benefits, because there are zero benefits to lockdown. We didn't need 12 months of evidence after lockdowns were implemented to predict they'd fail. The same Hopkins paper predicted this just months before. Here is the money quote:

In the context of a high-impact respiratory pathogen, quarantine may be the least likely NPI to be effective in controlling the spread due to high transmissibility. To implement effective quarantine measures, it would need to be possible to accurately evaluate an individual's exposure, which would be difficult to do for a respiratory pathogen because of the ease of widespread transmission from infected individuals. Quarantine measures will be least effective for pathogens that are highly transmissible, have short incubation periods, and spread through true airborne mechanisms, as opposed to droplets.

It was known from day one that this virus was highly transmissible like a cold and that there was no way we could stop the spread of it as we could of Ebola. Shortly afterward, it became apparent that this virus is transmitted through aerosols, not through droplets, which is why it spread like wildfire even after all the measures were strictly adhered to. It's also why masks became useless.

If one had to list the pros of masking and isolation on one side of a paper, and the short and long-term harms on the other side, the pro side would be blank and the con side would not have enough room to enumerate all of the ways we are destroying the social, mental, emotional, physical, developmental, and educational health of our kids.

Now, as more kids finally return to school, the same people who destroyed their lives for a year are now suggesting that they should strictly wear masks and be yelled at all day for not wearing them properly. "Oh, it's just a mask, what's the harm?" they ask. Yet anyone with a modicum of common sense understands that a mask, aside from the physical harms, serves as a constant reminder for children to needlessly fear this virus and one another. Would we ever treat our pets this way?

Thankfully, the public is finally starting to fight back. People took to the streets to demonstrate in cities throughout the world, including in nearly every country in Europe. Police in Austria even joined in with the protesters. The question for us is whether Americans will lead the freedom spring marches or follow far behind Europe.

Vermont to question schoolchildren over Thanksgiving gatherings, and require quarantine for violators



The state of Vermont has announced that schoolchildren and their parents will be questioned about the nature of their Thanksgiving gatherings after the kids' return to school, and children in families that admit to violating the state's rule against celebrating with another household will be required to quarantine at home.

What are the details?

Earlier this month, Vermont Gov. Phil Scott (R) issued an executive order prohibiting gatherings of any kind between households. The state's website notes that the ban "includes both inside and outside social gatherings, in public and private spaces."

On Tuesday, state officials delivered an added threat to those who dare to visit Grandma for Thanksgiving: Children will be banned from the classroom and must return to remote learning at home for two weeks — or for one week if they can present a negative COVID-19 test result after that time.

In a lengthy Twitter thread on Tuesday, Scott urged citizens to do their part in stopping the spread of the virus as the state experiences a surge in cases, and asked folks "to help by avoiding getting together with people outside your households and not travel this week."

"Unfortunately, we know some will still get together and schools have asked for help," he continued, before announcing that the Vermont Agency of Education "will direct schools to ask students or parents if they were part of multi-family gatherings and if the answer is yes, they'll need to go remote for 14 days or 7 days and a test."

Unfortunately, we know some will still get together and schools have asked for help. @VTEducation will direct schoo… https://t.co/3Nz5FCNQfj
— Governor Phil Scott (@Governor Phil Scott)1606235646.0

The Republican urged businesses to adopt the same policy, adding, "We also advise businesses to consider asking employees to quarantine if they don't adhere to gathering restrictions. This isn't a way around the ban or an excuse to get together. The more we adhere to this policy, the faster we'll lower case counts & ease up on restrictions."

State officials hope families will be honest

Vermont Education Secretary Dan French told the Burlington Free Press that state officials hope that families will be honest in answering their questions about Thanksgiving plans.

"Schools operate on trust with their parents and their students, and we're hopeful this guidance will give them some additional tools to help everyone do the right thing and keep school safe," French said.

The outlet noted that the rules against households interacting does not apply in the workplace, at retail stores, or in schools.

Anything else?

WPTZ-TV reported that since the beginning of November, Vermont has reported more than 1,500 new cases of COVID-19, and that "a model provided by the state's Department of Financial Regulation projects a 41% increase in new cases over the next month."

Horowitz: NYT is ‘surprised’ by obvious lack of viral spread in schools that opened



In March, schools in nearly every state did the unthinkable: They shut their doors for months, thereby destroying the social lives and education of a generation of children — all for a virus that poses no statistical threat to them. Now, weeks (and in some places, even months) after certain schools have reopened, the entire fear of kids as super-spreaders turned out to be a fabrication. While some of us knew this from day one and could have saved a generation of children months of despair, the New York Times finds it "surprising."

On Monday, the NYT reported that despite fears that New York's 1,800 public schools would serve as death traps, "nearly three weeks into the in-person school year, early data from the city's first effort at targeted testing has shown the opposite: a surprisingly small number of positive cases." The city received the results of 16,298 random tests throughout the public schools and found just 20 staff members who tested positive. How many students? Just eight — in all of New York City! And there's no evidence of serious illness among them.

It's not as if the virus is not spreading in the community. The schools reopened just as a resurgence of the virus became apparent in Brooklyn and Queens, yet there were just four positives out of over 3,300 tests in those two boroughs.

Rather than focusing on balancing nursing home safety and family visitation through mass testing, Gov. Cuomo is wasting testing resources by randomly testing 10%-20% of the public school's population every month, all for a virus that clearly does not spread much among children and certainly does not pose a greater risk to them than the typical pathogens they pick up every year in school.

"The emerging scientific consensus is that younger children do not spread the virus as easily as older children and adults," wrote the Times in an article titled, "Surprising Results in Initial Virus Testing in N.Y.C. Schools."

Well, no kidding. We could have told you that in the spring and saved months of lost education for kids and work hours for parents. Among over a dozen studies and data analysis from different countries showing that young children do not spread the virus (they get it from their parents at home), Icelandic researchers sequenced all the genomes from samples of every positive case in the country and failed to find a single instance of a child infecting parents.

The fact that so few children are infected in schools is truly astounding given the widespread outbreak of cases in communities in the majority of states this month. Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown University, created a dashboard of 300 schools offering in-person classes. She found just 10 cases per 100,000 among students, and that rate has held steady into October despite the growing community spread.

What's become obvious from the body of data on schools and day cares is that even the low numbers of cases in schools aren't being spread in schools, but from home. If children were spreading to each other at the same rate adults do, we would find entire classes infected.

A recent survey of over 57,000 day care providers in the U.S. published in the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics found no association between exposure to child care and a diagnosis of COVID-19.

Given that the jury is in and the verdict is rendered, how are there still so many schools closed indefinitely? The teachers' union in Fairfax County, Virginia, wants schools closed for the remainder of this school year. According to Professor Oster's database, there were just six student infections per 100,000 in Virginia during the first two weeks of October.

Moreover, why are children being abused with social isolation and mask-wearing for hours on end? Supporters of these measures might suggest that these regulatory rituals are the key to keeping the numbers low. But the reality is that we are not seeing the mask-wearing work among adults in any other setting. The number of infections among schoolchildren remains low, even as the numbers in the communities skyrocket, despite universal mask-wearing.

According to Pew Research, as of August, 80%-90% of residents of most regions reported regularly wearing masks. Those numbers have only grown as the mandates and the social norms and pressures have intensified over time.

Joe Biden said at the first debate that if we had universal mask-wearing, then deaths could be cut in half. But we have already had these mandates in place for months, and almost everyone is complying. So why are kids not spreading it while everyone else is? If anything, kids would be less likely to maintain proper hygiene and protocol while wearing masks than adults.

Furthermore, if you look at any data among schools that have reopened, you will find that the rate of infection is much higher among the staff, who are wearing masks just as religiously (and likely, more properly) as children. According to Professor Oster's dashboard, the infection rate for staff is 2.5 times higher than for children. And whereas the rate among children is flat, the rate among staff is going up with the community spread.

Finally, in a similar vein, we are seeing exponential spreading among college kids, despite very strict mask and social distancing mandates. Now, obviously, it's nothing but a casedemic – with nearly no hospitalizations and zero deaths – but the fact that it's spreading prolifically among school staff and among college students who wear masks, but not among younger children, demonstrates that there is a natural phenomenon playing out here, not human input.

Clearly, children do not spread the virus, but merely get the virus from their community, whereas adults in school spread the virus commensurate to the level of community spread.

This point is starkly evident in the data from Wisconsin. The Badger State saw the biggest spread in the nation coinciding with the opening of schools. The result? Yes, the infection rate among Wisconsin's schoolchildren did increase from 14 per 100,000 to 18 from mid-September to early October. But among the staff, it increased from 29 to 84! That demonstrates that school openings play no role in the spread and that the numbers are a reflection of the community spread, which mainly affects adults. The relatively few kids who get the virus would have gotten it from their parents or community regardless of whether they were in school, not from other students.

So, what is it going to take to restore the lives of our children? Certainly not data and science, because the shutdown and masking of young children was never driven by science to begin with.