The New Dark Age

When Baroness Hallett published her original draft terms of reference, children did not even appear. Many of us wrote in to the consultation, and were granted with a 4 week module which has just concluded. As ever, BiologyPhenom has done an amazing job reporting almost every day and with clips which should be a ‘Must watch’.

Molly Kingsley, cofounder of UsForThem, pointed out that the Inquiry team, as with so many other modules, appears to have made up its mind from day 1 that school closures should have started even earlier – a clue coming in the opening remarks from KC for Module 8, Clair Dobbin, keen to stress that school closures and lockdowns, though enormously damaging, “might nonetheless be needed in the future”.

BiologyPhenom quoted Baroness Hallett’s closing remarks: “And that completes the oral hearings for Module 8 the DEVASTATING impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on children and young people.’’ But as he rightly points out, “as the evidence at the inquiry reveals it wasn’t ANY pandemic of a novel virus harming children en mass, it was the destructive human rights depriving lockdown measures implemented from March 2020 along with associated media scaremongering. These were the real assaults taking place upon millions of lives.”

Of course we will have to wait for the recommendations, which may still be a year away, to learn whether this hugely expensive inquiry might just conclude that school closures were a disaster not only for educational harm but also mental and physical health and all aspects of children’s wellbeing. But I am not holding my breath.

One very clear testimony was from Professor Stephen Turner, the current president of the RCPCH, revealing that lockdowns caused more deaths from delayed presentation on other diseases than deaths from covid. As he says, there may have been awareness of the effects on children, but it did not translate into a proper impact assessment or any modification of the policies, which were all repeated in winter 2020/21, compounding the harms which had already occurred in spring 2020. Of note, Professor Turner pointed out that even clinical vulnerable children with known immunodeficiency didn’t run into problems with SARS-CoV-2. It is unfortunate that this was not pointed out clearer in Module-4, the vaccines module. Core participants in that module included the clinically vulnerable families’ support groups who were arguing that their members had been put at risk by the slow rollout of the vaccines to children.

Module 8 failed to notice the upending of the long accepted societal axiom of putting children first. During 2020 and 2021, we repeatedly saw children effectively being deployed as human shields with the guilt-tripping command “Don’t Kill your Granny”, applied to social distancing, school closures, masking, rule of 2, repeated invasive testing, and most sinister the pressure to take a new and poorly tested genetic product in the vain hope of reducing transmission to the vulnerable.

Here are some highlights, or perhaps I should say lowlights, as exemplars of the harms caused with all clips thanks to BiologyPhenom.

Dr Carol Homden, CEO of the Coram Group, spoke in detail of the mental health harms from school closures and lockdowns, not only for adolescents (also highlighted by Professor Delgado), but also for toddlers deprived of normal interactions and for whom the issues “will and may last a LIFE-TIME.’’ She pointed out what was obvious to anyone thinking critically about the fear propaganda, ‘‘When the news is on everyday talking about the number of people who are dying..that is again a unique moment, we don’t every year publicise how many people are dying for example from the latest flu occurance.’’

She concluded that, “Children must never again be treated as an afterthought in a national crisis.’’

Professor Russell Viner, past president of the RCPCH and member of SAGE, was clear that the lockdowns caused more childhood deaths from delayed presentation of other conditions than ever occurred from SARS-CoV-2 infections.. “more children were dying because of delayed presentations (e.g. due to meningitis) because their parents were heeding the message ‘Stay home, protect the NHS.’ ” It is worse than unfortunate that the College failed to get this message across to politicians at the time. Their website was always quietly reassuring to parents that this was a very mild condition for children, but they and the other senior children’s advocates such as Ofsted CEO and the Children’s Commissioner somehow failed to get a concerted message taken up by the MSM appealing to the public’s sense of fair play.

The testimony from the Children’s Commissioners from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland absolutely bear reading, as summarised by BiologyPhenom here

From Scotland, “It was clear from the very earliest days of the pandemic that decisions would have a life-long impact on a generation of children.’’

From Northern Ireland, ‘‘The disadvantaged gap widened…for those children who were MOST vulnerable they were most negatively impacted.”

From Wales, ‘‘We took AWAY children’s basic freedoms for the best part of 2 years…we took away their freedom to meet their friends..to see their grandparents..we took away their freedom to play…to exercise..to goto school. …That is a LIFE ALTERING… TRAUMATIC and pivotal experience that is going to have LIFE-LONG effects.“

But it was Monye Anyadike Danes KC, representing Northern Ireland’s Children’s Commissioner, who in her final closing statements, was perhaps the most outspoken. As she said:

‘‘It was recognised that government policies and measures were KNOWINGLY causing HUGE HARM to children and young people and that they were paying a HUGE price to protect the rest of society.’’ “There has been no proper explanation for such an EGREGIOUS FAILING…to have recognised that you are INTENTIONALLY doing something that is likely to cause harm…recognise that is IT IS causing harm and yet not having done the work to put in to mitigation or a reduction in those harms is simply inexplicable and has not been explained.’’

Danes’ testimony is endorsed by Northern Ireland retired head teacher, Hugh McCarthy, in his excellent series in UKColumn linked here: Lest We Forget — Part 2: They Knew. They Did It Anyway. We Know, Too

To our lasting shame, my generation allowed ourselves to be brainwashed by the propaganda into believing that our grandchildren had a duty to protect us at whatever cost to themselves. It was a fundamental breach of society’s responsibility for our children that they were ever included in a ‘one size fits all’ policy based on panic and poor science.