Ministers were given a stark warning that more children would die from suicide than from contracting COVID-19 if they shut schools, a damning new report from parent campaigners has revealed. The Mail has more.
Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on March 18th 2020 that England’s schools were to close until further notice – and they would remain shut for longer than any other country in Europe.
Many children returned to their classrooms in September 2020, only for schools to be shut again in January 2021. Even when they reopened that March, Covid outbreaks and isolation rules caused chaos.
It has now emerged that the Government was warned in November 2020 that “many more children will die from suicide than COVID-19 this year”, the Telegraph reports.
That message was given in a joint briefing paper by the Department for Education and the Independent Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours – in which they cited a rise in self-harm among young people during lockdown.
Those concerns were shared at a Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) meeting that same month – which senior scientific advisers responsible for briefing Westminster’s key players were in attendance for.
At least 10 senior officials from the Department for Education, the Cabinet Office, the Home Office and other departments were also at the meeting and therefore heard the warnings first hand.
Despite the alarm being sounded, the Government decided schools would be closed for most of the spring term in 2021.
In 2020, 161 people aged 10-19 died from suicide in England. That figure is almost five times higher than the 34 deaths from Covid for the same age group.
The suicide warning is one of nine opportunities the Government ignored to avert damage caused by closing schools during the pandemic, according to parents campaign group UsForThem.
UsForThem, which was set up by mothers Liz Cole and Molly Kingsley amid mounting concerns, is planning to release a series of reports on the various decisions made during Covid. This will include how SAGE papers documented the impact on school closures on stemming transmission was likely to be “highly limited”.
Worth reading in full.
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“Disinformation is one of the gravest threats weighing on our democracies,” he says.
This is absolsutely true, but it is the Governments who are using it to push narrative and silence opposition. Ergo, the Governments are the gravest threats to our democracies.
I must say, I’ve had doubts about how far Musk will go in his ‘free speech’ campaign. I dont think it reasonable for him to withdraw from the EU, so I expect he will sail somewhere close to the line, without actually crossing it.
Withdrawing from the EU might get people’s attention, though most likely people would blame Musk not the EU.
Musk can’t take on the EU by himself.
If the population were ready to see him as a champion and rally behind him to fight for free speech, then obviously he could.
But we’ve seen how spineless the population is. Many of them have offered up their children as guinea pigs for untested jabs to appease a menacing state bureaucracy, so…
I think it would do more harm than good for him to take that step, yes.
There’s little support for freedom of speech, at least in the UK and Europe, among people I speak to. People will tell you they like the idea, but when you start quoting types of speech (“hate”, “misinformation”) and ask if they should be allowed they will tell you “no of course not”.
It would also probably be suicidal.
I don’t see Twitter’s withdrawal from the EU’s code of practice an empty gesture. It is a signal. Now, one can debate what the signal is.
It might just be to try to look good. Or it might be a signal of measured defiance which says – ok, you might be forcing me to comply by turning a code into law, but I will t least, with my gesture, show you I don’t agree with it or like it.
I don’t know how committed Musk really is to free speech. I doubt few do. But if one assumes he is, how he plays his cards is anything but simple. It would be fiendishly complicated to try to runTwitter as a free speech platform in today’s regulatory environment, if that was what one wanted to do, without being destroyed by the heavy hand of ever more oppressive and authoritarian states.
My guess is that he’s trying to do his best, but I am ready to be disappointed and discover I’ve been naive.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again – Musk doesn’t give a flying duck about Free Speech.
Surely Twitter need to replace the display of offending content with a message saying banned in the EU. If people are really interested they can use a VPN to avoid this. If enough people are annoyed then there will be push back.
The EU appears not to want Twitter being what it is but wants something else instead.
The EU should build its own ‘service’ as it wants it to be – I’m sure they could make it just as popular eventually.
I hope Elon has the power and the balls to withdraw Twitter from the EU territory.