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The New York Times Finally Admits to the Harm Done to Children

Published

2 years ago

12 minute read

From the Brownstone Institute

BY Jennifer SeyJENNIFER SEY  

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

  • Jennifer Sey
    Jennifer Sey

    Jennifer Sey is filmmaker, former corporate executive, director and producer of Generation Covid, and author of Levi’s Unbuttoned.

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Pentagon agency to simulate lockdowns, mass vaccinations, public compliance messaging

Published on June 12, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

DARPA is getting into the business of simulating disease outbreaks, including modeling interventions such as mass vaccination campaigns, lockdowns, and communication strategies.

At the end of May, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) put out a Request for Information (RFI) seeking information regarding “state-of-the-art capabilities in the simulation of disease outbreaks.”

The Pentagon’s research and development funding arm wants to hear from academic, industry, commercial, and startup communities on how to develop “advanced capabilities that drive technical innovation and identify critical gaps in bio-surveillance, diagnostics, and medical countermeasures” in order to “improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.”

As if masks, social distancing, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates under the unscientific guise of slowing the spread and preventing the transmission of COVID weren’t harmful enough, the U.S. military wants to model the effects of these exact same countermeasures for future outbreaks.

The RFI also asks participants “Fatality Rate & Immune Status: How are fatality rates and varying levels of population immunity (natural or vaccine-induced) incorporated into your simulations?“

Does “natural or vaccine-induced” relate to “population immunity” or “fatality rates” or both?

Moving on, the RFI gets into modeling lockdowns, social distancing, and mass vaccination campaigns, along with communication strategies:

Intervention Strategies: Detail the range of intervention strategies that can be modeled, including (but not limited to) vaccination campaigns, social distancing measures, quarantine protocols, treatments, and public health communication strategies. Specifically, describe the ability to model early intervention and its impact on outbreak trajectory.

The fact that DARPA wants to model these so-called intervention strategies just after the entire world experienced them suggests that these exact same measures will most likely be used again in the future:

“We are committed to developing advanced modeling capabilities to optimize response strategies and inform the next generation of (bio)technology innovations to protect the population from biological threats. We are particularly focused on understanding the complex interplay of factors that drive outbreak spread and evaluating the effectiveness of potential interventions.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

“Identification of optimal timelines and capabilities to detect, identify, attribute, and respond to disease outbreaks, including but not limited to biosensor density deployment achieving optimal detection timelines, are of interest.” ­— DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

For future innovation, the DARPA RFI asks applicants to: “Please describe any novel technical approaches – or applications of diverse technical fields (e.g., machine learning, artificial intelligence, complex systems theory, behavioral science) – that you believe would significantly enhance the state-of-the-art capabilities in this field or simulation of biological systems wholistically.”

Instead of putting a Dr. Fauci, a Dr. Birx, a replaceable CDC director, a TV doctor, a big pharma CEO, or a Cuomo brother out there to lie to your face about how they were all just following The ScienceTM, why not use AI and ML and combine them with behavioral sciences in order to concoct your “public health communications strategies?”

When you look at recently announced DARPA programs like Kallisti and MAGICS, which are aimed at creating an algorithmic Theory of Mind to model, predict, and influence collective human behavior, you start to get a sense of how all these programs can interweave:

“The MAGICS ARC calls for paradigm-shifting approaches for modeling complex, dynamic systems for predicting collective human behaviour.” — DARPA, MAGICS ARC, April 2025

On April 8, DARPA issued an Advanced Research Concepts (ARC) opportunity for a new program called “Methodological Advancements for Generalizable Insights into Complex Systems (MAGICS)” that seeks “new methods and paradigms for modeling collective human behavior.”

Nowhere in the MAGICS description does it mention modeling or predicting the behavior of “adversaries,” as is DARPA’s custom.

Instead, it talks at length about “modeling human systems,” along with anticipating, predicting, understanding, and forecasting “collective human behavior” and “complex social phenomena” derived from “sociotechnical data sets.”

Could DARPA’s MAGICS program be applied to simulating collective human behavior when it comes to the next public health emergency, be it real or perceived?

“The goal of an upcoming program will be to develop an algorithmic theory of mind to model adversaries’ situational awareness and predict future behaviour.” — DARPA, Theory of Mind Special Notice, December 2024.

In December 2024, DARPA launched a similar program called Theory of Mind, which was renamed Kallisti a month later.

The goal of Theory of Mind is to develop “new capabilities to enable national security decisionmakers to optimize strategies for deterring or incentivizing actions by adversaries,” according to a very brief special announcement.

DARPA never mentions who those “adversaries” are. In the case of a public health emergency, an adversary could be anyone who questions authoritative messaging.

The Theory of Mind program will also:

… seek to combine algorithms with human expertise to explore, in a modeling and simulation environment, potential courses of action in national security scenarios with far greater breadth and efficiency than is currently possible.

This would provide decisionmakers with more options for incentive frameworks while preventing unwanted escalation.

We are interested in a comprehensive overview of current and emerging technologies for disease outbreak simulation, how simulation approaches could be extended beyond standard modeling methods, and to understand how diseases spread within and between individuals including population level dynamics.

They say that all the modeling and simulating across programs is for “national security,” but that is a very broad term.

DARPA is in the business of research and development for national security purposes, so why is the Pentagon modeling disease outbreaks and intervention strategies while simultaneously looking to predict and manipulate collective human behavior?

If and when the next outbreak occurs, the same draconian and Orwellian measures that governments and corporations deployed in the name of combating COVID are still on the table.

And AI, Machine Learning, and the military will play an even bigger role than the last time around.

From analyzing wastewater to learning about disease spread; from developing pharmaceuticals to measuring the effects of lockdowns and vaccine passports, from modeling and predicting human behavior to coming up with messaging strategies to keep everyone in compliance – “improving preparedness for future public health emergencies” is becoming more militaristically algorithmic by the day.

“We are exploring innovative solutions to enhance our understanding of outbreak dynamics and to improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.

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Business

Audit report reveals Canada’s controversial COVID travel app violated multiple rules

Published on June 11, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Canada’s Auditor General found that government procurement rules were not followed in creating the ArriveCAN app.

Canada’s Auditor General revealed that the former Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau failed multiple times by violating contract procurement rules to create ArriveCAN, its controversial COVID travel app.

In a report released Tuesday, Auditor General Karen Hogan noted that between April 2015 to March 2024, the Trudeau government gave out 106 professional service contracts to GC Strategies Inc. This is the same company that made the ArriveCAN app.

The contracts were worth $92.7 million, with $64.5 million being paid out.

According to Hogan, Canada’s Border Services Agency gave four contracts to GC Strategies valued at $49.9 million. She noted that only 54 percent of the contracts delivered any goods.

“We concluded that professional services contracts awarded and payments made by federal organizations to GC Strategies and other companies incorporated by its co-founders were not in accordance with applicable policy instruments and that value for money for these contracts was not obtained,” Hogan said.

She continued, “Despite this, federal government officials consistently authorized payments.”

The report concluded that “Federal organizations need to ensure that public funds are spent with due regard for value for money, including in decisions about the procurement of professional services contracts.”

Hogan announced an investigation of ArriveCAN in November 2022 after the House of Commons voted 173-149 for a full audit of the controversial app.

Last year, Hogan published an audit of ArriveCAN and on Tuesday published a larger audit of the 106 contracts awarded to GC Strategies by 31 federal organizations under Trudeau’s watch.

‘Massive scandal,’ says Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre said Hogan’s report on the audit exposed multiple improprieties.

“This is a massive scandal,” he told reporters Tuesday.

“The facts are extraordinary. There was no evidence of added value. In a case where you see no added value, why are you paying the bill?”

ArriveCAN was introduced in April 2020 by the Trudeau government and made mandatory in November 2020. The app was used by the federal government to track the COVID jab status of those entering the country and enforce quarantines when deemed necessary.

ArriveCAN was supposed to have cost $80,000, but the number quickly ballooned to $54 million, with the latest figures showing it cost $59.5 million.

As for the app itself, it was riddled with technical glitches along with privacy concerns from users.

LifeSiteNews has published a wide variety of reports related to the ArriveCAN travel app.

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