Children, as any parent knows, are not small adults. Their brain is growing and being acutely shaped by their environment and experience. Social skills and values are learnt from those around them, with teamwork, risk-management, personal boundaries and tolerance being learned through play with other children. Their immune system is imprinting environmental contact into a set of responses that will shape health in later life. Their bodies grow physically and become adept at physical skills. They learn both trust and mistrust through interaction with adults.
This rapid physical and psychological growth makes children highly vulnerable to harm. Withdrawal of close contact with trusted adults and enforced distancing has large emotional and physical impacts, in common with other primates. Lack of experience also leaves them vulnerable to manipulation by adults who are pushing certain attitudes or beliefs – often called ‘grooming’. For these reasons, our forebears put specific protections and norms of behaviour in place that elevated the needs of children above adults.
However, protecting children did not involve enclosing them in a padded cell – policymakers knew this to be harmful to psychological and physical development. It involved allowing children to explore their environment and society, whilst taking measures to shield them from malfeasance, including from those who would harm them directly or through ignorance or neglect.
The act of imposing risks on children for the perceived benefit of adults was therefore considered one of the worst crimes. The most cowardly use of ‘human shields’.
Article 3 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child places children at the centre of public decision-making:
In all actions concerning children…. the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.
When we are complicit in acts that we know are wrong, we naturally look for ways to avoid acknowledging our part in it or excuse the actions as being ‘for a greater good’. But lying to ourselves is not a good way to correct a wrong. As we have seen in other acts of institutional child abuse, it allows the abuse to fester and expand. It advances the interests and safety of the perpetrators over that of the victims.
Covid as a means for targeting children
In early 2020, a virus outbreak was noted in Wuhan, China. It was soon clear that this relatively novel coronavirus overwhelmingly targeted the sick and elderly, particularly those on unhealthy Western diets. The Diamond Princess incident showed, however, that even among the elderly the vast majority would survive the illness (COVID-19), with many not even becoming ill.
In response, Western public health institutions, politicians and media turned on children. Society implemented policies never seen before: a whole-of-society approach that was expected to increase poverty and inequality, particularly targeting lower-income people, and disrupt childhood development. It included restrictions on children’s play, education and communication, and used psychological manipulation to convince them that they were a threat to their parents, teachers and grandparents. Policies such as isolation and travel restriction, normally applied to criminals, were applied to whole populations.
The novel public health response was designed by a small but influential group of very wealthy people, often called philanthropists, and international institutions which they have funded and co-opted over the past decade. These same people would go on to be greatly enriched through the ensuing response. Encouraged by these same but now even wealthier people, governments are now working to entrench these responses to build a poorer, less free and more unequal world into which all children will grow.
Whilst rarely discussed in public spaces, strategies of targeting and sacrificing children for the gratification of adults are not new. However, it is a practice that normally elicits disgust. We can now understand better, having been part of it, how such actions can creep into a society and become integral to its character. People find it easy to condemn the past whilst excusing the present; asking reparations for past slavery whilst advocating for cheaper batteries produced through current child slavery, or condemning past institutionalised child abuse whilst condoning it when it happens within their own institutions. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not asking us to look to the past, but to the present. The most mature society is one that can face itself, calmly and with its eyes open.
The abandonment of evidence
Aerosolised respiratory viruses, such as coronaviruses, spread in tiny airborne particles over long distances and are not interrupted by cloth face coverings or surgical masks. This has been long-established and has been confirmed again by the US CDC in a meta-analysis of influenza studies published in May 2020.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus was somewhat unusual (though not unique) in its targeting of a cell receptor in the lining of the respiratory tract, ACE-2 receptors, to enter and infect cells. These are expressed less in children, meaning children are intrinsically less likely to be severely infected or transmit large viral loads to others. This explains the study outcomes early in the COVID-19 epidemic that demonstrated very low transmission from children to school teachers, and adults living with children having a lower-than-average risk. It explains why Sweden, following former evidence-based recommendations from the World Health Organisation (WHO), kept schools open with no ill effects on health.
Armed with this knowledge, we (as a society) closed schools and forced children to cover their faces, reducing their educational potential and impairing their development. Knowing that school closures would disproportionately harm low-income children with poorer computer access and home study environments, we ensured that the children of the wealthy would widen their advantage for the next generation. In low income countries, these school closures worked as expected, increasing child labour and condemning up to 10 million additional girls to child to child marriage and nightly rape.
Abusing children at home
For many, school provides the only stable and secure part of their lives, providing the vital pastoral and counselling work which identifies and supports children in crisis. When pupils are out of school the most vulnerable are the most affected, teachers can’t pick up the early warning signs of abuse or neglect, and children have no one they can tell. For children with special needs, essential access to multi-agency support frequently ceased.
Sport and extracurricular activities are important in children’s lives. Events such as school plays, school trips, choirs and the first and last days at school mark out their lives and are vital for their social development. Friendships are crucial for their emotional development, particularly during the crucial stages of growth – childhood, adolescence and young adulthood – and especially when there are vulnerabilities or special needs, children need access to family, friends, services and support.
The result of this neglect, as highlighted by a recent a UCL study on the outcomes of U.K. Government restrictions on children in 2020-2022, was nothing short of a disaster:
The impact of the pandemic will have detrimental consequences for children and young people in the short and long-term, with many not yet visible, it will have continuing consequences for their future in terms of professional life trajectories, healthy lifestyles, mental well-being, educational opportunities, self-confidence and more besides.
As the study finds: “Children were forgotten by policymakers during Covid lockdowns.”
Infants, children and teenagers endured numerous lockdowns during their most formative years, despite accounting for a diminutive proportion of Covid hospitalisations and deaths. The UCL study found that politicians did not consider children and young people a “priority group” when English lockdowns were enforced. Infants born into the Covid restrictions have marked delays in brain and thought development.
Education is provided to children as it benefits their educational and psychological development, provides a safe and protective environment and is a way of improving equality. So it was to be expected that when schools closed there would be development losses in very young children, reduced education attainment throughout the age profile, mental health issues and a rising tide of abuse.
In the U.K., 840 million school days were lost to the class of 2021 and nearly two million of England’s nine million pupils are still failing to attend school regularly. As early as November 2020, Ofsted, the body which inspects and reports on schools in England, reported that the majority of children were going backwards educationally. Regression was found in communication skills, physical development and independence. These impacts are seen across Europe and are likely to be lifelong. Despite this, the policies continued.
In the United States, school closures affected an estimated 24.2 million U.S. schoolchildren absent from school (1.6 billion worldwide) and the educative deterioration there is particularly clear. Schoolchildren have fallen behind in their learning by almost a year according to the latest assessments from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). About a third of the students didn’t reach the lowest reading benchmark and maths saw the steepest decline in history. As poorer students will have less access to the internet and support for remote learning, school closures also widen racial and ethnic inequalities.
And when schools did reopen in the U.K. a damaging and restrictive set of regulations were introduced: wearing masks, testing, bubbles, playground restrictions and static timetables. Post-primary children were spending all day in the same room, masked for nine hours per day if they used public transport to get to school. Isolation and quarantining led to continual absences. Teachers trained to know this approach was harmful continued to implement it.
The recent Ofsted report from Spring 2022 highlighted the damaging effects of the restrictions on the development of young children and should have been enough to set alarm bells ringing as it recorded:
- Delays in babies’ physical development
- A generation of babies struggling to crawl and communicate
- Babies suffering delays in learning to walk
- Delays in speech and language (noted to be partly attributable to imposition of facemasks)
This latter has also been noted by practitioners such as the Head of the Speech and Language unit in N. Ireland:
A growing number of young children are experiencing significant communication problems following the lockdowns and some who can’t talk at all, they grunt or they point at things they want and who don’t know how to speak to the other children.
A study by Irish researchers found that babies born during March to May 2020, when Ireland was locked down, were less likely to be able to say at least one definitive word, point or wave goodbye at 12 months old. A further study published in Nature found children aged three months to three years scored almost two standard deviations lower in a proxy measurement of development similar to IQ. With 90% of brain development taking place in the first five years of life, this has been tragic. Many children in this age group are now starting school far behind, biting and hitting, overwhelmed around large groups and unable to settle and learn with the social and educational skills of a child two years younger.
From a mental health viewpoint, we as a society attacked the mental health of children, following policies we knew were harmful and even designed to stoke fear; a direct form of abuse. Children were shut away in their bedrooms, isolated from friends, told they were a danger to others and that non-compliance may kill granny. An agenda of fear was imposed on them.
In the U.K. there are an astonishing one million children awaiting mental health support, whilst more than 400,000 children and young people a month are being treated for mental health problems – the highest number on record. More than a third of young people said they feel their life is spiralling out of control and more than 60% of 16-25-year-olds said they were scared about their generation’s future, 80% of young people reporting a deterioration in their emotional well-being.
As early as autumn 2020, U.K.’s Ofsted had identified:
- A 42% rise in self-harm and eating disorders
- An ‘explosion’ of children with disabling tic disorders
- Record numbers of children being prescribed antidepressants
- Increases in self-harm
In addition, five times more children and young people committed suicide than died of COVID-19 during the first year of the pandemic in the U.K. In the U.S., CDC reported that emergency department visits were 50.6% higher among girls aged 12-17 due to suicide attempts From early 2020, it was known that children were barely affected by the virus, having a 99.9987% survival chance, while they were not a danger to others.
Abusing children far away
Numbers are not people, so when we discuss dead or harmed children in large numbers, it can be difficult to understand the real impact. This allows us to gloss over the impact. However, UNICEF tells us that almost a quarter of a million children were killed by the lockdowns in 2020 in South Asia alone. That is 228,000, each with a mother and father, probably brothers or sisters.
Most additional child lockdown deaths will have been particularly unpleasant, as malnutrition and infections are hard ways to die. These deaths were anticipated by the WHO and the public health community in general. They would have lived without the lockdowns, so they were ‘added’ deaths.
The WHO estimates about 60,000 additional children are dying each year since 2020 from malaria. Many more are dying from tuberculosis and other childhood illnesses. With about a billion additional people in severe food deprivation (near starvation), there will probably be some millions more hard, painful deaths to come. It is hard to watch a child dying. But someone like us, often a parent, watched and suffered through each of these deaths.
While many in the public health and ‘humanitarian’ industries tell tales about stopping a global pandemic, those watching these deaths knew they were unnecessary. They knew that these children had been betrayed. Some perhaps can still claim ignorance, as the Western media have found discussion of these realities awkward. Their main private sponsors are profiting from the programmes causing these deaths, as others once benefitted from the abuse and killing to secure cheap rubber from the Belgian Congo or the mining of rare metals in Africa today. Exposing mass child deaths-for-profit will not please the investment houses that own both media and media’s Pharma sponsors. But deaths are the same whether the media cover it or not.
Why we did this
There is no simple answer as to why society reversed its norms of behaviour and pretended, en masse, that lies were truth and truth was a lie. Nor a simple answer as to why child welfare came to be considered dispensable, and children a threat to others. Those who orchestrated the closing of schools knew that it would increase long-term poverty and, therefore, poor health. They knew of the inevitability of increased child labour, child brides, starvation and death. This is why we run clinics, support food programmes and try to educate children.
None of the harms from the Covid response were at all unexpected. The children of the wealthy benefited, whilst the children of the less well-off were disproportionately harmed. This is the way society has worked historically – we just fooled ourselves that we had developed something better.
What is most concerning is that three years in, we are not just ignoring what we did, but are planning to expand and institutionalise these practices. Those who gained most financially from COVID-19, who backed this society-wide attack on the most vulnerable, wish this to be a permanent feature of life. There is no serious enquiry into the harms of the global response because these were expected, and those in charge have profited from them.
The desired reset was achieved; we have reset our expectations regarding truth, decency and the care of children. In an amoral world the happiness, the health and the life of a child only carries the importance we are told to attach to it. To change that, we would have to stand against the tide. History will remember those who did and those who did not.
Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease.
Hugh McCarthy is a retired headteacher in Northern Ireland who until recently served as a director on two of the province’s main education councils and who remains a ministerial appointment on one.
This article was first published by the Brownstone Institute.
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Coincidence that he flounces out now just as Pfizer comes under scrutiny?
I hope these people are held accountable for their actions sooner or later.
Not only that, links with Fauci under increasing scrutiny.
More like he’s sees which way the wind is blowing and is jumping ship while he can. Whether he is still part of sage or not he can and will (one day) be held accountable for the massive damage he and his colleagues have wrought on this country and its people.
Puffed up with unjustified self-importance, frequently wrong and up to his ears in all sorts of dodgy things and people. Good riddance to one who had little worthwhile to contribute other than doomy prophesy and a keen eye to his own murky interests.
Good riddance.
That is a fine and commendable summary of this man’s utter uselessness.
A clear example of the traitorous oxygen thieves now operating against the people of this country.
This disgraceful piece of crud is without doubt guilty of crimes against humanity.
Susan Michie next? One can but hope!
Cheerio doom monger.
So just another cronie of the medical industrial complex,
“The COVID-19 crisis is a long way from over”.
Well it’s pretty much over in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Florida, Texas….Uttar Pradesh
Well anywhere really that didn’t follow the Chinese faux narrative, employed their existing Emergency Pandemic Response plan and ignored dodgy modellers with a track record of abject failure.
He was director of the Welcome Trust with Whitty and Ferguson, so say no more.
What’s your source for Chris Whitty and Neil Ferguson having been directors of the Wellcome Trust? Or is that not what you meant?
You needn’t worry about complicity, Jeremy. Your shadowy presence as an hysteria driver in league with Fauci is on record. I wonder how many deaths you have caused, how many businesses wrecked, how many lives made unlivable. There is a special place in hell for your ilk, those who lie and know they are lying and care not at all.
Farrar spent 17 years as director of an Oxford University research unit in Vietnam.
Strict on applying the Nuremburg Code, are they, top medical researchers in that country?
It’s a while back now, but some may be interested to hear that part of the mind control research that was carried out by the US in Vietnam is said to have been taken over almost lock stock and barrel by the side that the US lost the war to…
What’s the real reason he left SAGE?
And did he jump before he was pushed. Either way, good riddance.
Bye.
Total narcisist.
Details also available at the Daily Fail with no paywall;
‘scientist quits SAGE over UK’s ‘concerning’ Covid infection rates
https://mol.im/a/10158061
Forgot to say ‘Check out the best rated readers comments!
Sounds like he is one of those to be found in the Common Room of epidemiological modellers (at Ferguson’s ICL, and elsewhere) chortling over their favourite joke:
Q: How many epidemiological modellers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None, because with epidemiological modellers, the light never goes out!
Out of interest: the Wellcome Trust owns a juicy portfolio of marinas, including Britain’s three largest: Brighton, Chichester, and Port Solent.
I think the rats are fleeing the sinking ship.
I so hope so, there are lot more that I hope will follow!
The truth is that government has listened far too much to the likes of Farrar, and we’ve been on the receiving end and paying the price. By paying attention to him, most of us have had our faces pushed into ever further immiseration.
Just think how many times the BBC have wheeled him on to further the psy-op they have been conducting on us.
A lockdown fanatic, he praises New Zealand for their fascist approach.
Continually pushing for all our kids to be jabbed up, and talking about vaccinating them as far back as mid-April, 2020.
Purveyor of the ‘no one is safe until we are all safe’ philosophy.
Farrar and the Wellcome Trust both operate on the dark side.
The twit should learn to differentiate between advice and orders.
Presumably, he’s ok and got his Waitrose delivery slot. Probably a live in maid and country pile to isolate in from which he can work from home.Covid has a side errect: it makes you want to vomit.
Sir Jeremy will doubtless get a warm welcome back to The Wellcome Trust, a dodgy medical research foundation with links to global corruption throughout the COVID-19 crisis as well as to the UK eugenics movement.
With luck, he might even be invited to join the DARPA-led team working on the ‘Wellcome Leap’ project to usher in nightmarish surveillance and control of all our children from the age of three. Sounds right up the good knight’s street.
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/06/investigative-reports/a-leap-toward-humanitys-destruction/
Headline should read –
Disgruntled liar throws his toys out of the pram for being caught out.
“Government scientific advisers live in a fantasy world”
Sadly not true. They live in the real world in which they fuck up our lives and wield great power and attract funding by lying through their teeth, most likely with the approval of the governments they serve.
The governments they serve? I think it’s the other way round.
You can run but you can’t hide Farrar. The law and the people will finally catch up with you and your ilk. The damage you and your kind have caused is almost beyond comprehension. And it was all planned wasn’t it.
Don’t forget Farrar has previous – he was heavily involved in attempts to ramp up hysteria over that other non-event – Swine flu.
“Huge pressure, eh?”
Tell that to the single parent with 3 young kiddies locked in a small flat for best part of 6 months.
Or the person whose business, built over a lifetime, was needlessly destroyed.
B@stard.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Oh and nowadays anybody with “Sir” in front of their name sounds dodgy to me. Clearly had his nose stuck up someone’s bottom somewhere along the line.
Jimmy Saville (Sir) comes to mind.
No, scientists did not come under pressure, the public came under imprisonment thanks to bozos like you, mediaeval witch doctors masquerading as scientists.
Your recommendations of communism were disastrous and you approved of thst disaster.
These SAGE apparatchiks will meet their nemesis when they are found guilty of Crimes Against Humanity.
Abusers always say ‘I’m violating your freedoms for your own good’
“Well connected” a.k.a. one totally useless knob who only speaks with other totally useless knobs
Minor typing error, perhaps? “..supporting research to end the pandemic.” Maybe it should be ‘to make a profit’ ?
“We must do more” is hard to argue for if the metrics are going the wrong way.
However, by leaving and things start going south again at some point (which they probably will to some degree) he can start making claims that he should have been listened to and that he was right to leave Sage.
The cess is starting to leak from under the cover up rug, Fauci is going to go down, but I suspect not for what he has done regarding Wuhan, gain of function and the vaxxine, but a story is emerging about gross mistreatment of puppy beagles used for experiments, which he authorised. In other words like Cuomo he will be made to leave but not for the crimes against humanity, I suspect this SAGE advisor see’s the writing on the wall and is covering his own back,
In the redacted still censored e mails Farrar is in with Fauci day 1 to hide the origin of this pandemic.His departure has perhaps more to do with this. The other thing is smokescreen
“Incredible that Jeremy Farrar is still pontificating on such matters when he refuses to detail his central role in the scientific establishment’s cover-up on the pandemic origins.”
https://twitter.com/ianbirrell/status/1455647459321987075
Can we please stop pandering to these so-called scientists by calling model output ‘evidence’. It is absolutely not!
That is the picture of a man who is in love with himself….an ego that is fed by hubris and money; a man in cahoots with Fauci the fraud is tainted goods. He is still spinning the line fed by Gates that the ‘pandemic’ is far from over…” going right through (to) 2022..” They are desperate not to lose the narrative created back in January 2020 but it is slipping through their grubby criminal compromised fingers.
He is typical of the scientists the government has been taking advice from over the past 2 years.
These idiot savants only have their narrow viewpoint and cannot understand concepts outside their own discipline such as public health, risk, choice, freedom, etc. If you are a hammer everything looks like a nail.
I am sure a road safety “expert” would like to see zero traffic on the roads or a blanket 10 mph speed limit; there would of course be zero deaths but our whole economy and way of life would collapse.
For goodness’ sake, don’t give them ideas!
Catch the rat before it gets away!
Has he realised yet that the ”pandemic” is over? And that that bunch should now be called SAG?
Not the brightest button in the box, is he? A title doesn’t make one competent – and who on earth thought he was worth knighting? What a horrible little ‘man’.
Yet again, the lunacy is based firmly on their god like misconception that an air borne respiratory disease is controllable. But they are not gods
They must know that it’s not controllable – but they are in thrall to the ‘narrative’ and well-paid to be so too. So that they’re even prepared to sacrifice what few principles they have. There’s no ”misconception” – that’d be forgivable. They’re not forgivable.
DELUSIONAL ARROGANCE!!!
“ I began to question the point of giving advice to a body that chose not to use it.”
Why should the executive automatically follow the advice of mere advisors of just one aspect of the overall picture? Who does he think he is?
I wonder where his funding comes from.
Another fantasist bites the dust.
Very fortuitous for Sir Farrar to join Wellcome Trust at this particular time given, as far I can understand, it is set to profit from the ‘pandemic’
Good. Now if all the rest of the Sage numpties also fuck off, perhaps we can have some actual science to follow.
Good riddance!
Please get stuck in the revolving door on the wat out.
The bloke is a 100% useless, lying chunt who will be rotting in jail soon
Oh how these Chunts snigger when they hear us saying anything about justice being done.
The Wellcome Trust…
Sir Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust.. there’s no need to say more..
He knows he picked the wrong side of history and is jumping ship to try and minimise his punishment come the Trials.
In ancient Israel false prophets were to be stoned to death. The reason of course is they would lead people to go down dangerous paths and blame god for it. Hmm, not saying we should reinstitute such for modelers but, we would probably get better models and lot having our society and economy undone for no good reason (Covid and Climate Change as latest examples).