We’re publish a guest post today by Dr David McGrogan, a Professor at Northumbria Law School, making an impassioned plea to higher education providers not to switch to ‘remote learning’ next term in response to the Omicron panic. In his view, this will send a series of terrible messages to students, including that the world is a dangerous place and you had best avoid it by living your life online. You can link to Professor McGrogan’s Substack newsletter here.
It’s “déjà vu all over again” as Covid restrictions are reimposed. The sense that more is coming is almost palpable – a repeating pattern that it increasingly feels we will never escape.
Here in higher education, the mood is a strange mixture of resigned and febrile. On the one hand, staff and students plod gamely on towards the end of the semester while trying not to think about the news. On the other, there is a drumbeat of anxiety underpinning everything: will we be here in January, or will it be back to the dreaded ‘remote learning’, which we performed for almost the entirety of last year?
‘Dreaded’ is not too strong a term. The experiment of 2020-21, if it can be called that, was a disaster. It is no slur against either academic staff or students to confess this. We all did our best, but it was made painfully evident during the last academic year that human beings simply can’t learn from sitting in front of a screen. Teaching is a relationship that has to be performed in person, where teacher and student can read each other’s gestures and facial cues, gauge each other’s reactions, and – more importantly – build the foundations of trust on which education rest. Students need to be enthused about what they are studying by being in a room with a lecturer who really appreciates the importance of their subject. They sometimes also need to be told to concentrate, to listen, to stop looking at their phones. None of this works when mediated through a digital device.
Those are just the educational reasons why the shift to remote learning was so harmful, though. Far more serious, in my view, were the messages that it sent to students.
The first of these messages was: although your money is important, you as an individual are not. You may have had a bad experience, but that doesn’t particularly matter in the grand scheme of things; universities stayed afloat, halls of residence were full, the number of NEETS did not explode and embarrass the Government, and the game went on. You were worth sacrificing in the name of those imperatives.
It was hardly deliberate that this message was sent to undergraduates, but it is the one which many of them, consciously or unconsciously, will have taken from the way they were treated during 2020-21. It is unfortunate enough that this will have created a lot of bad blood between students and universities (despite the fact that it cannot really be said to be the fault of universities themselves). More seriously, it will have created a lot of resentment in the younger generation toward society as a whole: when push came to shove, they now will feel they were really just an afterthought.
The second message was: the reason why you go to university is to get a degree. Why does it matter if you didn’t really learn much all year and had a rubbish experience? You’ll get a 2:1 at the end anyway. Higher education was already being instrumentalised at speed thanks to the introduction of the requirement for students to pay tuition fees. The shift to remote learning put this on rocket boosters.
However, it will hardly need emphasising to anybody who went to university before, say, 2010, that the experience is about much, much more than just getting a degree. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott memorably described university as an “interval” – a “reprieve for three years from the rat race”; a kind of pause between childhood and the “long littleness of life”. It was sheer “good fortune” to be able to go, and it was there to be enjoyed “as Pope Pius II on his election said he intended to enjoy the Papacy”. It was “magic”, and if missed once would never come back again.
It is fashionable nowadays to look snootily down one’s nose at university students and their supposedly pampered, frivolous lives. There is something deeply mean-spirited in that outlook. Shouldn’t we want our young people to have the sheer pleasure and freedom that Oakeshott described, especially if we were lucky enough to have been students once ourselves? Shouldn’t we consider it one of the most wonderful blessings of living in a developed economy to be able to spend three or four years of young adulthood simply in the exercise of exploring, and doesn’t it diminish the younger generation to demand that they leap into the “littleness of life” without even a brief pause for breath beforehand?
The third message sent – perhaps the worst of all – is that the thing to do in this world, when adversity strikes, is to hide. We already face what can fairly be called an epidemic of anxiety and other mental health disorders among the young. That problem will not go away if we continually transmit to teenagers and young adults the message that the world is dangerous and, since it is, you had best avoid it by living your life online. The truth, as we all know in our hearts of hearts, is that, yes, the world is dangerous, but that’s no reason not to live as full and rich a life as one can. We do our young a terrible disservice when we encourage in them a fear of normality. Yet this is precisely what we will be doing if we insist, once again, that it is simply too risky for a normal university education to take place.
It was perhaps excusable that nobody paused to consider all of this in the pell-mell sprint towards remote learning in the autumn of last year. It will be well remembered that there was simply a general sense of panic; universities were by no means alone in being swept along in the flood. This time around, there can be no excuse: enough is enough – we have to get university life back to normal.
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“Note that such a frequency is properly termed ‘uncommon’ not ‘rare’: It might be better to state the difference between whatever it is compared with other vaccines, which are in common use. It’s awkward to access such records, but I’ve come across some Swedish comparisons between annual ‘flu vaccines and both the Pfizer and AZ C-19 products; they did not look very nice. No vaccine product is 100% risk free, like most activities – but the promoters avoid explaining what they mean by terms like “safe and effective”.
As things have panned out, I’m glad I said “no thanks, I might change my mind if it becomes an established product”, when it was offered to me. I suspect that the usual suspects do not want to be open about it, and in effect, proper informed consent is not available unless one does a fair bit of independent work. That is not a proper service to us.
These are the recorded adverse effects of the influenza vaccine and MMR vaccine according to the BNF. Apologies for the formatting.
“For influenza vaccineCommon or very common
With intramuscular use Chills; hyperhidrosis; induration; local reactions; pain
With intranasal useNasal complaints
UncommonWith intranasal useEpistaxis; face oedema
Frequency not knownWith intramuscular useAngioedema; encephalomyelitis; extensive swelling of vaccinated limb; febrile seizure; nerve disorders; nervous system disorder; paraesthesia; presyncope; shock; syncope; thrombocytopenia; vasculitis
With intranasal useGuillain-Barré syndrome”
and
MMR
“For measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, liveUncommonIncreased risk of infection; rhinorrhoea
Frequency not knownAngioedema; arthritis; ataxia; cough; dizziness; encephalopathy; eye inflammation; irritability; meningitis aseptic; nerve deafness; nerve disorders; oculomotor nerve paralysis; oedema; panniculitis; papillitis; paraesthesia; regional lymphadenopathy; respiratory disorders; seizures; Stevens-Johnson syndrome; subacute sclerosing panencephalitis; syncope; throat pain; thrombocytopenia; vasculitis”
“Description of the frequency of side-effects
Very common greater than 1 in 10
common 1 in 100 to 1 in 10
Uncommon [formerly ‘less commonly’ in BNF publications] 1 in 1000 to 1 in 100
Rare 1 in 10 000 to 1 in 1000
Very rare less than 1 in 10 000
Frequency not known frequency is not defined by product literature or the side-effect has been reported from post-marketing surveillance data”
Thanks for that information.
There is no hard evidence that the Covid shots are either safe or effective, or that they ever will be. The incorporation of the Covid-19 shots into the routine schedules would be based on what exactly?
German headline should read –
“Covid Vaccines cause serious injury for one in 5,000 doses – TO DATE”
The future doesn’t look too bright either. There seems to be evidence of the jabbed being more susceptible to further covid infection resulting from vaccine failure and/or a weakening of their immune systems. GVB, Dr. Peter McCollough etc.
All those I know currently ill with the C1984 are fully perforated. And there have been a few.
Add to that growing evidence of infertility
So it’s been a “success” then?
Eugenicist Bill will be pleased, won’t he?
This report on the “vaccine” injury rate is after 2 or 3 doses of the monkey-juice. Prof Bhakdi (and others) predicted that with every booster shot, the rate of adverse effects and the number of deaths it would cause would get worse.
Whilst it is progress that the Germans, and to a lesser degree, the British Government is admitting that they cause damage/death to some (the UK Government has finally paid out compensation to a handful of people) they are still down-playing the numbers affected and are pushing jabs on younger and young people and boosters on people who really don’t need one.
What these very belated admissions demonstrate to Joe Public (or would, if they used their brains and paid attention) is that by having the monkey-juice, you are participating in a mass human “vaccine” experiment. Do these people NEVER look in the mirror and suspect that they see a lab rat looking back at them?
Joe just watches the telly and believes in the adverts, reads the posters and so on. Of course, it there was a proper advertising standards outfit, a lot of it would not be published in any media, or the publishers would be at risk of being prosecuted or sued for damages.
Oi, I have never had a telly to watch
Canada is an interesting case study at present. They currently have the highest fatality rate they’ve ever experienced from Covid despite 86% vaccine coverage & far higher than this in the vulnerable age groups, 70+. So, if you were a Canadian wouldn’t you wonder why you’d taken the risk inherent in the vaccine for no benefit?
Is there anyone who can shed light on what’s happening in Canada or has OWID got the data wrong?
The reports from EudraVigilance that cover all Europe show, overall, a serious adverse reaction of 1 in 424 per jab. Averaged over the last 3 weeks, it is 1 in 111.
The actual deaths from the jabs is unclear, the last total being 46,652, but this based on summing from reactions. There appear to be currently overall 3.22 reactions per death. This makes the total 14,468.
From these death figures, we have an overall death rate per jab of 1 in 62,304. Averaged over the last 3 weeks, it is 1 in 18,380.
Overall, the deaths per case have been remarkably constant at about 1 in 40 average over all 4 jab types.
https://t.me/mikes_stuff/445
These are all short-term effects; In a few year’s time, things could be far, far worse,
That’s true. However, it seems that EudraVigilance monitor cases for a longer time that MHRA. This is evidenced by reports for AstraZeneca which is hardly used in Europe.
MHRA totally fail to follow up any cases – even fail to investigate those unexplained ‘sudden death’ cases currently running at 640.
Definitely. This Winter will see an escalation.
Hi CG, well I have tried to respond to your message – twice in fact but some reason it they haven’t gone.
Cannot find out how to PM you through this site.
Will check this post in a few hours.
So sorry about this as I would like to help.
“As it is, hardly anyone knows that these are the Government’s own data on serious vaccine reactions, and governments are making no obvious effort to tell them.”
Is it me, or is this criminal? Free and informed consent, anyone?