Our children: the forgotten, silent victims of our pandemic
What do Kamala Harris, Pope Francis, and Nelson Mandela all have in common? It might sound like the start of a bad joke, but they each led us to one common revelation that is anything but funny. All three have said that society will be judged by the way it treats its children. It is the true measure of society’s health.
At the outset we sold our pandemic reaction to our children as something positive. This was to be their generation’s World War – the war against the virus. Their cooperation would save many lives. The small, inexpensive, short-term, personal sacrifices they would be called to make were presented in the most noble light imaginable. They now find themselves living under the shadow of that once noble light.
What’s unique in our generation’s response to a pandemic ( - unknown in any historic pandemic - ) is the emergency use of vaccines. These vaccines were initially touted to protect the old and vulnerable. Where they are used, and necessary, to prolong the lives of the old, then their longer term side effects matter little. But with these vaccines being rolled out to a wider audience and younger cohort the longer term side effects become more important to know and consider, as anyone taking these will have to live the rest of their lives with any (as yet unknown) long term side effects. In adults, we have the principle of informed consent, where the person can judge for themselves whether the benefits outweigh the risks. A child will have no such choice, but will have to live with the consequences of an exploratory medication programme long after their parents, as the recent class action against swine flu vaccine narcolepsy attests. Prudence is called for.
It’s been clear from early in this pandemic that children were at minimal risk from Covid. We were even told they had little risk of spreading the virus. The vaccine quickly shifted from treatment for the vulnerable, to widespread “herd immunity” usage, and now it seems, that is to extend to our youngest too, in time to justify trials of Covid mRNA vaccines on infants as young as six months old! It’s an excessive, unnecessary step to combat the virus (but perhaps not unnecessary to the pharma giants currently missing the “vaccine candidate in this important younger age population”) I reiterate: the longer term (1+ years) side effects of these vaccines are unknown, can not yet be known, and no short-term clinical trial on children will change that. (Regulatory authorities won't protect them from long-term effects; their function, as we have seen, is only to monitor on-going revelations about the treatments and advise accordingly.) We also do not know what effect these novel treatments will have on the physical development of our children. To expose them to that unknown medical risk, at this stage, for the slim chance of reducing some risk to the elderly and vulnerable, is an abuse of our children’s lives and health, and we should not stand for it. (The chances are certain, of course, that pharma company’s profits will increase if Covid therapeutic drugs are authorised for use on children too.) It is particularly critical now that European institutions have supported them in declaring that mandatory vaccination of children does not violate their “human rights” and - what’s worse - may be necessary in “democratic” societies. Time to cry ‘stop’. We have inflicted enough damage on our children this year. This far and no further.
Thousands of 2020 newborns have not been getting their 12 month health checks from public heath nurses. We taught our children in 2020 to withdraw from others, to distance themselves even from their friends. We’ve taught them to fear contact with people, locked them up in our homes. When they did have the opening to socialise and meet friends at Easter we warned them off ‘risky’ play dates. It is perhaps best that they have only been in school a few weeks this year anyway, as the Irish school system has proven to be morbidly lacking in ability to teach students to think outside the box again. Instead, it has taught them this year an unquestioning compliance with state health propaganda and through forced mask-wearing in schools, at earlier and earlier ages, indoctrinated them in a culture of virophobia, and actually damaged their development. It is not just me saying this. A German judge who recently struck down mandatory pandemic restrictions in schools stated: “The compulsion imposed on school children to wear masks and to keep their distance from each other and from third persons harms the children physically, psychologically, educationally, and in their psychosocial development, without being counterbalanced by more than at best marginal benefit to the children themselves or to third persons. Schools do not play a significant role in the "pandemic" event.”
What we clearly should be teaching our children – perhaps during this opportunity of home schooling – is how to think for themselves for the future. Let’s teach our children never to be taken in by the State’s con tricks that we’ve fallen for ourselves, that it used to arrogate our freedoms to itself under the guise of “public health”. If they can recognise in future all the same old tricks of the con artist that were employed in this pandemic - instil fear, invoke authority, pressure to respond - then perhaps there will be hope that the next generation won’t make the same mistakes of this one, and that their own children’s future will be brighter.
Our older children, of teen age, may already be learning those lessons for themselves, from what they have observed and experienced indirectly from us. They know their future is no longer as bright as it was over a year ago. And they suspect (rightly) it is adults that have robbed them of that future. Many have not had a proper leaving certificate exam (or result), and their college prospects have suffered. Those lucky enough to get the college place they deserve have had to forego celebrations with schoolmates, and struggle remotely to form the most meaningful new friendships college freshmen will make in their lives – college friendships that can last a lifetime, and essential in their future personal life and career. The jobs environment they will eventually graduate into may be starkly different. Opportunities will be less, taxes undoubtedly higher, and standard of living worse. In the face of these dismal prospects this year, no wonder they want to unwind, have fun, and meet up with friends, anywhere they can .. in parks, in homes. And when they did ... they were further told by the grown-ups that the Covid situation is their fault. In any normal year, I might consider myself one of those grumpy adults tut-tutting at the antics of teens with the best of the curmudgeons, but this Easter, as I looked at our teens walking the roads aimlessly with beer cans in their hands, I felt sorry for them.
We’ve robbed them of their present, and their future, and told them it was their fault.
Youth should be a time to be free, to discover, to rebel, to make mistakes, and so to learn, and to grow. We’ve been stifling all that. We’ve been giving them the message that to be young, to do the things that the young do, will kill us.
The young are expected to bear the consequences of their mistakes, but what they should never have to do is bear their elders’ mistakes too. Unfortunately, they frequently do. It is one thing for adults to make their mistakes, and to have to live with the consequences - that’s part of being adult. But it’s quite another thing to expect – or demand – that children shoulder the burden of those same mistakes. While the effects of this interminable lockdown may be bad enough for adults who lose their jobs and experience stress and hardship, that’s part of the deal of being an adult. But our children will, yet again, have to pay the price too. In our rising national debt – our children’s future is being trashed to buy immediate support for lockdown mistakes and vaccination coercion, to buy cover for this generation of politicians’ failures. They will be off the stage by the time the next generation is fully aware of the con trick that has been performed on them, and what’s been done with their future. Our children should not have to shoulder the burdens of this generation’s failures because they will have the future of their own children (if they can afford them) to consider and build. They can’t build that future if they are still fixing the past.
Mask-wearing in children and vaccination trials on minors should be the wake-up call for our society. Does the present State’s assault on childhood innocence and welfare know no bounds? Protecting children must, in any age, be society’s firmly drawn line.
They are suffering as it is. But you don’t have to take an adult’s word for it. Listen to it from the voices of the real victims themselves.
As adults, we were so willing to tolerate nonsensical impositions from our establishment, that we willingly enforced it on our children too. An appropriate pop lyric from my own youth comes to mind: ‘if you tolerate this, then your children will be next.’