COVID-19
The New York Times Finally Admits to the Harm Done to Children
From the Brownstone Institute
The New York Times published an op-ed over the weekend entitled ”The Startling Evidence of Learning Loss Is In.” Here’s the second paragraph:
The evidence is now in, and it is startling. The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education. It also set student progress in math and reading back by two decades and widened the achievement gap that separates poor and wealthy children.
For anyone who has been paying even a modest amount of attention for the past 3 ½ years, the evidence is anything but startling.
People often ask me, and even more so since this “startling” piece hit the digital airwaves: “Don’t you feel redeemed?”
In fact, it’s hard to describe how angry this “revelatory” piece of writing makes me. More than 3 years too late, the New York Times has now given permission to acknowledge what was obvious from the beginning. But if you dared to say so in 2020, or 2021, or even 2022, you were smeared with all sorts of career-ending ad hominem attacks, including but not limited to: racist, eugenicist, ableist, science-denying alt-right Trumper, flat earther and sometimes Nazi.
So no. I don’t feel grateful that the New York Times has finally deemed this subject acceptable to talk about when the damage has already been done to both American children and those dissenters who challenged the fear-mongering, and data-denying mainstream narrative with actual science and facts.
Furthermore, this “journalistic” outfit fails to acknowledge their own complicity in these devastating results.
It was clear what would happen all along, but the New York Times failed to interrogate the issue and instead published “the science” as determined by Big Pharma press releases, teachers’ unions, and government leaders cowing in the face of public health bureaucrats.
My first writing on the subject was this in February 2021, but I had started pushing back from day one — March 2020 — in my own community, on news programs, on social media, and with open schools rallies, like the one pictured here from December 2020.
There were times I felt like I was going insane because it was all so patently clear what was happening and would only be made worse the longer schools stayed close: the learning loss; the disengagement from education overall; the depression and anxiety and suicidality due to severe isolation (often summarized as “mental health impacts”); the chronic absenteeism that would inevitably come because when you tell kids that their education isn’t important – isn’t a societal priority – well, they will believe you; the dropout rates; the graduating without being able to read; the abuse at home; the loss of community and hope.
But the more we sounded the alarm bell the more we were demonized.
Unsurprisingly, the poorest, most vulnerable children were harmed the most. Which is also clearly what was going to happen from the outset if you exercised even a modicum of common sense. Because, despite the wealthy hordes in Los Angeles and New York City shrieking about how We’re all in this together! –from their fancy balconies in the Hollywood Hills and the acreage of their Montana vacation homes — they also hired private tutors and formed learning pods with hired help to guide their kids and make sure they stayed on track. And, their children returned to their $60k a year private schools in the fall of 2020, a year before those who couldn’t afford the luxury of in-person education.
It was poor and low-income children who were left home alone to navigate “Zoom school” while their parents worked hourly wage “essential” jobs. And it was poor and low-income children left home to take care of younger siblings. Or find community – and trouble – outside of school. It was poor and low-income children who missed meals by not being in school, who didn’t have WIFI that worked, who didn’t have adult intervention and oversight that happens in school.
But no child was immune to the impacts. Just when adolescents are meant to be individuating from their parents, they were forced to be at home, alone, relying on screens for any sense of connection to their peers. They missed out on proms, football games, debate club, youth sports, graduations, and all of the small everyday milestones that make a teen’s life. And they were given no hope that it would ever end because it just kept going and going. In some states students experienced disruption to their schooling for as long as 19 months.
And even then, when they finally returned to school full time, they suffered under onerous restrictions including masking, distancing, testing, periodic closures, and no extra-curricular activities.
Furthermore, young people were made to feel like horrible monsters if they struggled with this isolation. They were called selfish grandma killers if they yearned for their friends or wanted to celebrate their graduations. They were made to feel shame for being human. Is it surprising that record numbers of young people were thrown into depression, anxiety, eating disorders, suicidal ideation, drug use, and sometimes, even suicide?
It’s nice that the New York Times has caught on now. But in this accurate oh-so-too-late piece, they fail to acknowledge their own complicity in extending and furthering the devastating, ineffective, and morally abhorrent school closures during 2020-2021, with restrictions to children continuing for more than a year after schools actually opened everywhere in the Fall of 2021.
They elevated the voices of those who furthered fear with a schools needs to be closed or else all the children and teachers will die hysteria.
Science reporter Apoorva Mandavilli persistently stoked fears about the danger of Covid to children and downplayed the significant risks of keeping them at home, “learning” on screens, isolated from their peers.
In October 2021, just as children across the country were heading back to school, Mandavilli exaggerated the number of children hospitalized for Covid by 14x, or 837,000 cases.
She continued to stoke unwarranted fear just when kids were going to get a semblance of their lives back, at a time when adults had been going to bars and dance clubs and sports stadiums for over a year.
Was her intention to encourage school districts to shut down again? Who knows. Certainly, she got the numbers way way wrong. She was so caught up in the fear-furthering hysteria — having participated in it for a year and a half at that point — she must have lost the ability to count.
Certainly, there was ample evidence that kids were at little to no risk, nor had they been since the very beginning. But any suggestion — with data cited — that Covid was not in fact dangerous to kids, was deemed “Covid denialism” by Mandavilli.
This is a science reporter for the New York Times, folks, not some Twitter rando. Her articles and Tweets carried real weight and influence.
The New York Times failed to interrogate the issue of closed schools during Covid in real time. They platformed fear-mongers and silenced, vilified, or just ignored dissenters, which included renowned doctors and scientists who dared to challenge the mainstream narrative like those featured in the pages of this publication.
The New York Times consistently published government and Big Pharma issued press releases as if they were journalism. They platformed the spokespeople of these entities and their paid influencers furthering unwarranted fear and packaging it as “the science.”
If a normie like me could read and interpret the data available since March 2020 and know that not only would closed schools be incredibly harmful to the most vulnerable children, but that their risk from Covid was thousands of times less than an elderly person, then certainly the science desk at the New York Times should have been able to do so.
Simply pushing the narrative that “everyone was at equal risk” was journalistic malpractice.
The news organization needs to go so many steps further than this op-ed.
They need to apologize for their untruthful, damaging reporting which gave cover to government leaders in refusing to open schools and teachers’ unions in refusing to return their members to the classroom.
They need to apologize for smearing those of us who challenged. We didn’t just suffer reputational harm and hurt feelings. We lost friends, our communities, our jobs, in some cases. And our voices were not part of the necessary societal discussion that needed to happen but didn’t. Because the New York Times presented one viewpoint — kids are at terrible risk and schools need to stay closed — as the undisputed “science.” As inarguable fact. Anyone who dissented was clearly an insane, selfish, and very dangerous lunatic.
Lastly, after apologizing to both the children harmed and the dissenters dragged through the mud, the New York Times needs to pursue this story relentlessly. So that children get the help they so desperately need and deserve.
And so that it never happens again.
Author
Censorship Industrial Complex
Quebec court greenlights class action suit against YouTube’s COVID-related content censorship
From LifeSiteNews
The lawsuit, led by video blogger Éloïse Boies, argues YouTube violated freedom of expression under the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms by censoring COVID-related content.
A class action lawsuit against YouTube’s censorship of COVID-era speech on the platform has been allowed to proceed in Canada.
The primary plaintiff in the case which has now been greenlit by the Quebec Superior Court is YouTuber Éloïse Boies, while the filing accuses the Google video platform of censoring information about vaccines, the pandemic, and the virus itself.
A copy of the order can be found HERE.
READ: Elon Musk skewers Trudeau gov’t Online Harms bill as ‘insane’ for targeting speech retroactively
Boies, who runs the “Élo Wants to Know” channel, states in the lawsuit that three of her videos got removed by YouTube (one of the censored videos was about… censorship) for allegedly violating the website’s policies around medical disinformation and contradicting World Health Organization and local health authorities’ COVID narratives of the time.
However, the content creator claims that the decisions represented unlawful and intentional suppression of free expression. In February, Boies revealed that in addition to having videos deleted, the censorship also branded her an “antivaxxer” and a “conspiracy theorist,” causing her to lose contracts.
The filing cites the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms as the document YouTube violated, while the class-action status of the lawsuit stems from it including any individual or legal entity in Quebec whose videos dealing with COVID got censored, or who were prevented from watching such videos, starting in mid-March 2020 and onward.
Google, on the other hand, argues that it is under no obligation to respect the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, and can therefore not be held accountable for decisions to censor content it doesn’t approve of – or as the giant phrased it, provide space for videos “regardless of their content.”
But when Superior Court Judge Lukasz Granosik announced his decision, he noted that freedom of expression “does not only mean freedom of speech, but also freedom of publication and freedom of creation.”
Stressing the importance that Canada’s Supreme Court assigns to guaranteed freedom of expression as a key building block in a democratic society, the judge concluded that “If (Google) carries out censorship by preventing certain people from posting videos and prevents other people from viewing these same videos, it thus hinders the free circulation of ideas and exposes itself to having to defend its ways of doing things.”
Google was ordered to stop censoring content because it contradicts health authorities, WHO, or governments, pay $1,000 in compensation, and $1,000 in punitive damages to each of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, as well as “additional compensation provided for by law since the filing of the request for authorization to take collective action, as per the court’s decision.”
As for those who were prevented from accessing content, the decision on damages will be the subject of a future hearing.
Reprinted with permission from Reclaim The Net.
COVID-19
British MP Andrew Bridgen gives powerful speech on ‘scandal’ of excess deaths after COVID jab rollout
MP Andrew Bridgen
From LifeSiteNews
By Frank Wright
British MP Andrew Bridgen called for an immediate suspension of ‘all mRNA treatments in both humans and animals,’ saying that excess deaths in 2022 and 2023 was ‘the greatest medical scandal in this country in living memory, and possibly ever.’
With three years of excess deaths still mysteriously unexplained, Dr. John Campbell devoted an entire video to a House of Commons debate on what MP Andrew Bridgen has called the “greatest medical scandal in this country in living memory.”
Introducing Bridgen as “a hero of the people,” Campbell’s report from April 18 shows footage of the “COVID-19: Response and Excess Deaths” debate of the same day.
Led by MP Andrew Bridgen, who was expelled from the Conservative Party for his outspoken criticism of the so-called vaccines and the political culture which enabled the disastrous lockdown measures, the opening speech was heard by a mere handful of MPs in a largely empty chamber.
His full speech can also be viewed here on the U.K. Parliament website, beginning at 14:33:21.
The public gallery was packed, however, with Bridgen’s summary call for the government “to immediately suspend the use of all mRNA treatments in both humans and animals” met with resounding cheers and applause.
Bridgen opened with a denunciation of a scandal whose dimensions he explored with forensic detail.
We are witnesses to the greatest medical scandal in this country in living memory, and possibly ever: the excess deaths in 2022 and 2023. Its causes are complex, but the novel and untested medical treatment described as a COVID vaccine is a large part of the problem.
The independent MP warned of the verdict of history on the actions of a government which had “gaslit” its people into compliance.
Future generations, who will be genuinely agog that the evidence has been ignored for so long, that genuine concerns were disregarded, and that those raising them were gaslit, smeared, and vilified.
The scandal of excess deaths, which the U.K. and other governments still refuse to connect to the “safe and effective” mRNA injections, is one dimension of a politically charged culture of silence, says Bridgen.
Data hidden
Noting that he is one of the few members of Parliament with a science degree, he said:
One does not need any science training at all to be horrified by officials deliberately hiding key data in this scandal, which is exactly what is going on.
He went on to recount how data on excess deaths was being withheld from the public, and had now been recalibrated to downplay the figures.
The public are being denied that data, which is unacceptable; yet again, data is hidden with impunity.
He notes how Professor Jenny Harries, the U.K. Health Security Agency chief, has “said that this anonymized, aggregate death by vaccination status data is “commercially sensitive” and should not be published.”
Bridgen records how “Professor Harries has also endorsed a recent massive change to the calculation of the baseline population level used by the ONS to calculate excess deaths.”
Data model changed
This new model is “now incredibly complex and opaque,” he claimed, “and by sheer coincidence, it appears to show a massive excess of deaths in 2020 and 2021 and minimal excess deaths in 2023.”
The implication is that the modeling has been altered to suit the narrative, which routinely denies any connection between the “vaccine” rollouts and excess deaths, as well as soaring heart conditions and rising cases of aggressive cancers.
Yet the “old calculation method, tried and tested for decades” showed “the [U.K.] excess death rate in 2023 was an astonishing 5 percent.”
Bridgen points out that these deaths came “long after the pandemic was over, at a time when we would expect a deficit in deaths because so many people had sadly died in previous years.”
Due to Harries’ changes in data capture, he said, “some 20,000 premature deaths in 2023 alone are now being airbrushed away through the new normal baseline.”
Harries attracted derision for her claim that 2,800 excess deaths over the summer of 2022 were due to climate change.
Safe and effective?
Earlier that day, Bridgen had called on Parliament to compel the ongoing COVID-19 inquiry to investigate directly the claim that the so-called vaccines, were “safe and effective.”
He said, “I asked the house to support the motion today for Baroness Hallet’s inquiry to open module four on the safety and efficacy of the experimental COVID-19 vaccines.”
This inquiry has lately been criticized by a group of U.K. public health scholars and academics for its lack of impartiality. The signatories include Oxford zoology Professor Sunetra Gupta, infectious medicine specialist Dr. Kevin Bardosh of Edinburgh University, and over 50 others including legal, sociological, and medical experts.
TikTok dance of death
In their March 12 open letter published on the website Collateral Global, it is claimed that “the [COVID] inquiry is not living up to its mission to evaluate the mistakes made during the pandemic,” being “fundamentally biased” in its “preferential treatment to scientific advisers … who have a vested interest in maintaining the justification for their policy recommendations.”
[T]he format of the Inquiry is impeding investigation into the key scientific and policy questions.
These policy questions include the confusing means by which deaths were recorded, alongside the further scandal of “iatrogenic deaths” – caused by medical intervention. The use of drugs which restricted breathing, such as morphine and midazolam, was condemned by Bridgen.
“The result is that people died who didn’t need to die while nurses performed TikTok dances,” he said.
Death by medical protocol
Pointing out that “the body clears all the viruses within around seven days,” Bridgen noted “very few people will know that the average time to death from COVID symptoms and testing positive was 18 days.”
He says this is due to the fact that “doctors abandoned the standard clinical protocols.”
Instead of using former antibiotic and steroid treatments, he says, “they sent people home … then when they returned to the hospital, they sedated them, put them on ventilators and would watch them die.”
Bridgen says this was done due to new “protocols for COVID-19 treatment” – which have now been deleted from the public record.
“The body responsible for this protocol (NG1 163) is called the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence – NICE.”
Bridgen says that a key passage – recommending the use of the respiratory depressant midazolam – had been removed from the updated guidelines.
Can the minister explain why midazolam was then removed from the same updated guideline on the 30th of November 2023?
His next question was one which no one in government has been willing to answer.
If legal cases are brought for unlawful killing – can the minister tell us who’s going to be taking the blame?
Will it be NICE? Will it be NHS England – or will it be the individual doctors and nurses who will be held to account?
A cover-up?
Suggesting a cover-up of deaths which contributed to the excess seen in the lockdown period, Bridgen pointed out, “NICE has now removed these alternative protocols including NG1 163 from their website, although every other historic protocol is still there.”
Could the minister tell us why they have removed this protocol from their website?
Are they ashamed of the harm that they caused? They certainly should be.
Bridgen went on to note the contrast in recording “deaths and illnesses” after vaccination compared to those attributed to COVID.
There’s a huge stark contrast in how deaths and illnesses after vaccination have been recorded compared to COVID.
He said:
After a positive COVID test any illness and any death was attributed to the virus, [whereas] … after the experimental emergency use vaccine was administered, no subsequent illness and no death was ever attributed to the vaccine.
Recalling the mantra that governments were “following the science,” Bridgen added that “these are both completely unscientific approaches and that’s why we have to look at other sources of data excess deaths to determine if there is an issue.”
Noting that the notorious drug Thalidomide was also once described as “safe and effective,” he demanded rules be put in place to prevent the “government and other authorities” becoming the “Big Pharma’s marketing department,” as he claims it was under the COVID regime.
‘They knew’
Citing the millions of pounds paid to the vaccine-injured and the fact that the prime minister himself could not defend the “safe and effective” claim when it was put to him personally, Bridgen stated that “those who imposed these vaccines knew very well that they could never prevent infections from a disease of this kind.”
Referring to data from Australia, he stressed the unwillingness of governments to make the obvious connection between excess death, heart injuries, and cancer rates with the “novel mRNA vaccines.”
Calls for a ban
He closed with an appeal which condemned the fact the injections contained DNA and disrupted that of the host receiving the injections, also against former assurances to the contrary.
Madam Deputy speaker the evidence is clear: these vaccines have caused deaths … serious harm and they will have raised the risk of cancer to many more.
I ask the House – it’s time to take the politics out of our science and … to put some actual science back into our politics.
With this, he called for an immediate ban on the experimental treatments.
I call on the government once again to immediately suspend the use of all mRNA treatments in both humans and animals.
The science ‘was not followed’
One of only 12 other MPs in the almost empty chamber, Sir Christopher Chope, spoke in support of Bridgen’s call, which was met with resounding cheers from the public gallery. The speaker threatened to clear the public gallery, saying “the clapping must stop.”
Graham Stringer, Labour MP for Blackley and Broughton, is one of those few MPs with a scientific background. He said the claim made by the U.K. government and others to be “following the science” was simply false.
The science was not followed.
Stringer cites the change in public health advice, which contradicted earlier statements by public health officials such as the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, and the government’s chief medical adviser, Chris Whitty.
If you go back and look at the early statements, you will see … people from the NHS, Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty saying masks were a waste of time and that lockdowns were ineffective.
The U.K.’s Independent reported in March 2020 that “[c]hief medical officer tells public not to wear masks – Chris Whitty instead advises people to regularly wash their hands.”
He told Sky News in an interview that “wearing a face mask if you don’t have an infection … really reduces the risk almost not at all.”
"Wearing a mask if you don't have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all."
Chris Whitty tells @KayBurley the only people advised to wear masks are those with an infection to prevent further spread.#KayBurley
Get the latest on #coronavirus: https://t.co/NdI5p1vKfk pic.twitter.com/GZNFsfKcfy
— Sky News (@SkyNews) March 4, 2020
Stringer says, “That advice changed very quickly under political pressure.”
If this pressure did not come from following the science, where did it come from?
The U.K. government now appears to be following a policy of silence, given its own COVID inquiry in 2023 confirmed that the government knew that there was “no point” to wearing masks, which had “very little effect on the spread on [sic] COVID.”
Evidence was submitted from a government official at the prime minister’s residence, Number 10 Downing St., in February 2023. Parties at Number 10 during lockdown were captured on film.
Junior Downing St official:
"Wine Time Fridays continued throughout, social distancing not enforced, mask wearing not enforced…wider culture of not adhering to any rules.
"No.10 was like an island oasis of normality"Following rules for the cameras, continuing as normal inside pic.twitter.com/7rabZp9NM8
— Tristan Kirk (@kirkkorner) June 15, 2023
In his own diaries, Vallance himself condemned the then Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s decision to mandate mask-wearing in schools as a “totally political” decision, according to a Daily Telegraph report from March 12. According to him, the decision was “not based on medical advice.”
It was instead a result of her political ambition to present a policy distinct from that in England to fortify a renewed call for Scottish independence.
It is obvious that political pressure has played a role in shaping the lockdown era. It is also now apparent that the obvious is excluded from the news, with governments still refusing to acknowledge any connection between the novel mRNA treatments and the entirely predictable side effects seen in the vaccine-injured and the otherwise inexplicable rate of excess deaths.
If you want to know where the truth of the matter lies, just follow the silence. It’s not coming from the public gallery.
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