Next year, the thing to keep an eye on in global health is measles, thanks to the interruption of routine immunisation programmes as a result of the lockdown policies. The Telegraph has more.
There have been recent outbreaks in countries as diverse as Ethiopia, India, Tajikistan and Poland. Last year, 22 countries experienced large outbreaks, with an estimated nine million cases and 128,000 deaths worldwide. Countless children will have suffered terrible neurological damage as a result, which will permanently blight their lives. Measles is, of course, entirely preventable. But vaccination coverage has steadily declined across the world since the beginning of the Covid pandemic because of disruptions to healthcare, leaving us in our present situation.
It is not the only childhood vaccine that millions have missed, but because of the speed at which measles spreads it will be the first we notice next year. In the areas hit, healthcare will have been found wanting and other preventable disease outbreaks will likely follow. “The paradox of the pandemic is that while vaccines against Covid were developed in record time and deployed in the largest vaccination campaign in history, routine immunisation programmes were badly disrupted, and millions of children missed out on life-saving vaccinations,” WHO director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said.
It would be a big mistake to think that these are just problems facing developing countries. The UK lost its measles-free status in 2018 after vaccine rates slipped and cases surged. And the latest data suggest vaccine coverage for the second dose slipped further during the pandemic, to just 85.5% at five years, with 43 cases recorded in the year to September 2022. Only Tajikistan and Turkey recorded more in the WHO European Region.
In November, the organisation warned that there is now an imminent threat of measles spreading to different regions around the world as Covid has led to a steady decline in vaccination coverage and weakened surveillance of the disease. ‘Plummeting measles vaccination rates should set off every alarm,’ Elizabeth Cousens, president and CEO of the United Nations Foundation, has said. ‘There is no time to waste. We must work urgently to ensure life-saving vaccines reach every last child.’
Ephrem Tekle Lemango, Unicef chief of immunisation, added: “For three years, we have been sounding the alarm about the declining rates of vaccination and the increasing risk to children’s health globally… The time for decisive action is now.’ Countries that fully vaccinate 95% or more of their population create herd immunity against measles and quickly become measles-free. But the world is well under that threshold at the moment, as is the UK. It’s a marker of how much damage Covid has done to our health services – and how much we have to do in 2023 to make up for lost ground.
Stop Press: According to the Lancet, summarising a CDC report, one factor in the spread of measles is growing vaccine hesitancy. This global phenomenon predates the pandemic, but a lack of transparency about the safety and efficacy of the Covid vaccines, as well as the suppression of voices expressing concerns (see the most recent Twitter Files), may have increased vaccine hesitancy. The BMJ published an article earlier this year exploring whether a lack of trust about the Covid vaccines could be contributing to declining MMR uptake in England.
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Good article. I would like to see the demographic makeup of Michaela, I doubt it ressembles the photo. Seems the Education Propaganda UberGruepenFuehrer was too busy with the Muzzies and non-Whites (as given in the photo op) to care much about what enables and drive high performance. As if great athletes were not coerced, forced, discplined, coached, berated and pushed beyond normal limits. Maybe the UberGruepen puppet can visit say a poor working class white school in the North East? And discuss the disadvantages experienced by this ‘class’ of whites?
‘I doubt it ressembles the photo’
What’s your point?
Suggest you do your research Ferd. The photo-op is of Michaela school and the adult is Ms Birbalsingh. see https://michaela.education/home/secondary-school-wembley/ I believe the racial mix is roughly that of the community within which the school is located.
1% of the students are White British. Kumbabloodyya.
Wembley is as English as Waziristan.
A poster for why the country is in the shitter.
https://crystalroof.co.uk/school/140862-michaela-community-school
Watch the documentary of Michaela and the head mistress. It is a once in a lifetime story for this country. And of course it is a huge success. Brits don’t do success, they prefer losers, whiners and a feudal system.
We used to do success before the planned invasion.
You can search online, it’s about half muslim.
I think Ms Birbalsingh has done a marvelous job, by all accounts. I’m wondering just how many more strikes of reality the resident misogynists can take to their delusion…LOL.
Speaking of schools, since when has it been normal for them to have lock down practice runs, that have nothing to do with lurgy viruses/government overreach? The U.S I can understand, as school shooters are a very real threat, but the U.K? Check out this letter from a deputy head teacher. Is it another ‘new norm’ like armed police at Christmas markets and ‘diversity barriers’ in city centres?
”Why has the UK reached a point where children must practice hiding in classrooms, away from windows, and in silence, to ensure their safety?
Yesterday pupils at a school close to a hotel filled with immigrants in Altrincham were taken through plans on how to safely go in to lockdown in case of emergencies
Schools are now acting like fortresses rather than just centers of learning
This shift towards routine lockdown drills indicates a troubling trend where even the sanctity of a school environment is no longer guaranteed
While lockdown drills are a necessary response to current threats, they are not a solution but a symptom of deeper societal problems
As a community, we need to address these underlying safety issues head-on!”
https://x.com/ActivePatriotUK/status/1865197148163170707
Maybe this was just a one-off;
”Farnborough 6th Form College was sent into lockdown following a bomb threat against the school. Hampshire police were called at 11.35am following reports of the bomb threat.
Nearby schools were also locked down during the incident. Students were not allowed to enter or leave the site, with the school telling outsiders to not to contact the college.
Police say a 40-year-old man has been arrested, and remains in custody.”
https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/live-lockdown-farnborough-6th-form-30404852?utm_source=linkCopy&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebar
An acquaintance of mine was recently on a visit to a London school with work colleagues as part of a planned educational outreach programme. During their visit, the school was put into lockdown. At one stage, they were even instructed to hide under desks. One of the visitors tried to call their office during the lockdown, to raise the alarm. Perhaps it was fortunate that they couldn’t get a signal, because it proved to be a drill. Even so it was highly traumatic for the visitors, and arguably unfair to put them into that sort of position without having either warned them or rescheduled their visit for reasons which the school would not have needed to disclose. This is just another example of people in authority showing no care or concern for the mental wellbeing of those in their charge. Nothing has been learnt from the Covid lockdowns.
Socialism is all about process not outcomes.
I suppose the school just isn’t doing it tte “correct” way.
After all, the Process is the Punishment.
My old headmaster used to say (quoted from somewhere else…)
“A child is like a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled”
Probably because the Michaela School doesn’t fill their heads with ideological mumbo-jumbo!
This success is very inconvenient and embarrassing for Phillipson and her supporters.
You don’t understand, people. This Communist Indo-Guyanese Sikh woman masquerading as a “small-c” Tory, who labelled herself as “Britain’s strictest headteacher, etc.” is tasked by the Globalists to train Third World Ethnics for THE GREAT REPLACEMENT. The photo accurately reflects the ethnicity of the majority of students.
There is little mention that the school was co-founded by Joe Kirby, who “rewrote Year 7’s study of the Odyssey, removing the parts he felt were less important to read.”
Her methods are Stalinist:
“There is no group work. Children sit in rows and learn by rote, walking in single file between classrooms.”
“Pupils must be silent in school corridors and are forbidden to gather in groups larger than four.”
“Lunchtime consists of a pescatarian meal [no red meat allowed] described as a “family lunch”. Pupils sit at tables of six, with one teacher or guest, and take responsibility for serving each other. They lay the table together. One pours water. Another brings in and serves the food. Another serves dessert. Two clear the table following the meal. TEACHERS EAT WITH THEIR STUDENTS, and the tables discuss what the children have learned that day, or a topic of the day such as the most inspirational person they have learned about in their history classes. After eating, the pupils spend five minutes thanking someone, followed by two claps from the rest of the school.”
Joe Kirby introduced a key method of organising knowledge at Michaela, from Wikipedia:
“In 2015, Michaela Community School teacher, Joe Kirby, wrote a blog detailing the value of listing, on one side of A4 paper, key points to learn.[1][2] He called the template a knowledge organiser.[3][4]”
I would also question why ALL school children are forced to learn ANY of The Odyssey. I know nothing about it, and that ain’t done me any harm, innit.
Perhaps Starmer attended a similar school!
Brings to mind The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie this talk of school and fascism. I don’t know anything about this case but of course they should have acknowledged this achievement regardless of their views on discipline. I can’t imagine anything too nasty goes on with the law as it is these days. To get these results with slum-dwelling children in England is a very impressive achievement. I wish I had that ability and vision and optimism for the future. I think people who are quick to dismiss fascism make the mistake of confusing discipline with sadism. Westerners who go to Japan to study martial arts often remark that within Japanese society fascism has a family feel. Like the Kurosawa film where the man shows how easy it is to break one stick with this hands. But if you bundle a number of sticks together, as in a family, it becomes very difficult to break. It is a silly mistake the conflation of the discipline of a totalitarian state, which is inevitably coercive, with the discipline that can co-exist with genuine benevolence.
Bridget Phillipson Communist Clown
“At university, Catherine Birbalsingh was a member of the Socialist Workers Party, and read ‘Living Marxism’, the journal of the Revolutionary Communist Party.”
“It was resurrected as ‘Spiked’, an internet journal, which has published many articles by and about her.
Catherine Birbalsingh Communist Clown
It is the only path. Even in the 1950s TS Eliot remarked that young boys needed something strong to be attached to. Ask yourself, has there been any sort of coherent philosophy regarding the human will since 1945? It was as if after this date the will was just some free-floating energy and if a child or a pet willed something then this willing contained some validity. This is a complete betrayal of those that we are supposed to look after.
Since 1945 it has been the cult of ‘…the man from Whitehall knows best..’
So where were the Tories in 14 years to improve schools and suppress wokery there? Where are they now?
What a failure they have been and they remain so.
Absolutely.
And Labour can be trusted to make matters even worse.
Gov did improve the schools. He made the exams more rigorous and we have moved up the international tables in science and maths in the past 10 years. It is labour who will send us backwards again. The science for 21C I had to teach in the early 2000 was drivel
the answer to your headline is so simple. Michaela is an institution of excellence, the current government is an example of complete incompetence, and negligible intelligence. Excellence is a word that would NEVER be used to describe the socialist gov’t in place.
Congratulations re the West London Free School.
Regarding Michaela, it is clearly a very good school. However it is not that simple, and it is not just down to discipline.
There is a clue in that line “she’s seen a stream of independent school families paying her a visit”. When you have a good school, it attracts parents who want the best for their children, and who value education. And in turn that is one of the reasons why the school continues to do well.
In short, it’s about the pupils and their parents, and not just the school.
Unfortunately too many parents in our country don’t care about education, don’t see the value in school for their children, and don’t support their schools. Parents who complain about Britain’s schools need to look at themselves and their friends as well as the schools themselves.