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

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

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‘They lied to us’: Wife of 53-year-old who died hours after receiving Remdesivir speaks out

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From LifeSiteNews

By Michael Nevradakis Ph. D., The Defender

Shannon is trying to raise public awareness of the COVID-19 hospital protocols that she believes led to her husband’s death.

In August 2021, 53-year-old Michael E. Pilgrim and his wife Shannon had just celebrated their 29th wedding anniversary and were looking forward to their daughter’s marriage in October.

A former military service member and father of two, Michael was a “good husband and great dad” and enjoyed golf in his spare time.

However, Michael’s fortunes dramatically changed that month when he experienced difficulty breathing and a low oxygen level. On Aug. 17, 2021, he was admitted to Dallas Regional Medical Center, near his hometown of Forney, Texas, with a COVID-19 diagnosis.

Two days later, on Aug. 19, he was dead.

In an interview with The Defender, Shannon Pilgrim said that from the time Michael was admitted to the hospital, she and other members of her family were barred from visiting him and kept in the dark about the treatment he was receiving.

READ: 26% of those prescribed Remdesivir for COVID died, according to Medicare database

According to Shannon, Michael’s medical records showed that doctors barely offered Michael any treatment and emphasized his unvaccinated status. Treatments Michael received included the controversial drug remdesivir — administered hours before his death.

Today, Shannon is trying to raise public awareness of the COVID-19 hospital protocols that she believes led to her husband’s death. She shared extensive medical documentation with The Defender corroborating her story.

‘Contradictory’ medical records contained ‘many gaps’

“The worst thing that’s ever happened to me is calling 911,” Shannon said. “I thought that I was doing the best thing for Michael. I came to find out that was the worst thing.”

Michael was taken to Dallas Regional Medical Center, a hospital that “has a horrible reputation” according to Shannon. She accused the hospital of refusing her request for Michael to be transferred and did not let her see him after he was admitted.

Shannon said communication with the hospital was limited. “I would call and the nurses would tell me they were on shift change or were busy and couldn’t talk to me.”

Doctors’ interactions with Michael were also limited, Shannon said. “They were just leaving him in a room and they had an iPad popped in to ask him about medical stuff.”

According to Shannon, most of what she’s learned about Michael’s treatment came from the medical records she obtained after his death — even though the records “are completely just contradictory” and contain “many gaps.”

Shannon referred to an instance when a Dallas Regional doctor told her that Michael was doing well — while the records indicate that the doctor called her to say Michael was in critical condition.

Shannon said the records revealed that the hospital “did nothing” for Michael. She said:

On the first day, they basically didn’t do anything except give him oxygen. The next day, he had a chest X-ray and then doctors gave him vitamins … there’s contradictory stuff in here about whether he even had an IV. I can’t even get — from looking at his medical records — if they gave him fluid.

They started giving him Lovenox shots for blood clots. Why? He didn’t have blood clots … Then they started giving him insulin. Why were they giving him insulin? He wasn’t a diabetic.

But according to the medical records, they really didn’t do anything, and that’s what just completely floored me — except they gave him remdesivir.

Remdesivir, which has been linked to deaths and injuries in COVID-19 patients, was commonly administered to patients under the COVID-19 hospital protocols.

According to Shannon, the records indicate that Michael was administered remdesivir on the day of his death. But as she recalls, when she spoke to her husband on the phone that day at noon he showed no signs of being in danger.

“He called me, and I actually got to talk to him. I didn’t talk to him very long, but he wasn’t on a ventilator. He was better,” Shannon said. “I called my kids and I was like, ‘He sounded so good.’ I said, ‘He’s going to be coming home.’ I was so excited.”

Yet, that afternoon, Michael was given remdesivir. According to Shannon, the hospital called her a few hours later to say that Michael was found unresponsive.

“I got hysterical,” Shannon said. “I was asking again and again, ‘Is he OK? Where is he? How do I get in touch?’ … She wouldn’t give me her name. She just said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ She said he coded and they took him to ICU and ‘someone will call you tomorrow’ … And she hung up the phone on me.”

Shannon’s son called Dallas Regional and was told Michael had died. But the family’s difficulties did not end there, as the hospital did not allow them to see Michael’s body.

“We didn’t get to see him until he was embalmed, because they told us that he had COVID,” Shannon said.

Shannon said she believes her husband’s unvaccinated status played a role in the treatment he received. She said Michael had been “cautious” about the COVID-19 vaccine and reluctant to receive it — and that the hospital was aware of this.

“You see all through his medical records, ‘unvaccinated,’ ‘unvaccinated,’ ‘unvaccinated,’” Shannon said. “It’s even written in there, ‘doesn’t trust the vaccine.’”

‘They completely lied’

Shannon said the hospital stonewalled her and her family after Michael’s death.

“They wouldn’t talk to me, they wouldn’t take my calls,” Shannon said. “I kept calling up there and begging to have somebody tell me what happened and nobody would tell me.” The hospital then started pursuing her for unpaid medical bills, she said.

When she did speak to hospital personnel, they misled her. In one instance, she said a doctor told her that while she had the right to have an autopsy performed on Michael’s body, local authorities were “six to eight months behind” and that she’d have to wait that long for the body to be released.

“They completely lied, because later I found out that by law they have to do an autopsy within two weeks, and then it can be six to eight months before you actually get the report. But they have to do it and they have to release the body. But they lied to us and we trusted them,” Shannon said.

Instead, Shannon said the government-funded COVID-19 Bereavement Assistance Fund offered a $10,000 payout for Michael’s death. “They were giving up to $10,000 if the death certificate had COVID on it. And I said, ‘no way in hell will I take that payout.”

Instead, Shannon became an advocate for families that endured similar experiences, by joining the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation. Through her involvement with this advocacy group, Shannon has met with legislators, attorneys and family members of other COVID-19 hospital protocol victims.

“It’s hard, but I don’t want other loved ones to go through what we went through,” Shannon said. “I realized that I want to keep fighting. And so, as hard as it is to keep reliving this timeframe, I will keep doing it … I don’t want people to think he died from COVID, because he didn’t. He died at the hospital because of them. They killed him.”

 

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

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Media failing to cover ‘powerful testimony’ of people injured by COVID vaccines

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From LifeSiteNews

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., The Defender

Kate Scott’s husband Jamie was an athlete, a high-power executive, and an active husband and father of two boys until he nearly died after experiencing jab-induced immune thrombosis and thrombocytopenia from the AstraZeneca COVID shot.

Important information coming out of the ongoing UK Covid-19 Inquiry is “slipping between the cracks” of media coverage, YouTube commenter John Campbell, Ph.D., reported on a recent episode of his show.

Campbell played clips of testimony by Kate Scott, who represents the U.K.’s Covid Vaccine Injured & Bereaved (VIBUK). Kate’s husband, Jamie, suffered a traumatic brain injury and was left severely disabled by the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Kate’s testimony is part of the inquiry’s fourth module, investigating issues related to the COVID-19 shots and therapeutics.

Jamie was an athlete, a high-power executive, and an active husband and father of two boys until he nearly died after experiencing jab-induced immune thrombosis and thrombocytopenia. He was in a coma for four weeks and five days.

Jamie survived, Kate explained, but his life will never be the same. His traumatic brain injury affects his thinking processes and his emotions. He is partially blind and he will never be able to work again, to live independently, or to look after their children.

Kate said that she and her group were testifying to draw attention to the fact that many people were injured by the shot, to remove the stigma of jab injuries, and to compel the government and pharmaceutical companies “to look again at how to deal with the inconvenient fact of vaccine injury and bereavement and the lives it has shattered.”

She said the very first serious side effects from the AstraZeneca shot “should have rung an alarm with the MHRA” – Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency – and the U.K. “government that there was a serious problem. However, no action was taken.”

She presented data that VIBUK obtained via a freedom of information law request showing that, as of November 30, 2024, 17,519 vaccine injury victims have made claims to the government’s Vaccine Damage Payment scheme.

Of those, she said, only 194 victims have been notified that they are entitled to payment, and only 55 have received any payment. The maximum allowed payment is 120,000 pounds (approximately $150,000).

Kate also revealed that people are deemed ineligible for compensation if they are considered less than 60 percent disabled and that many people receive diagnoses that they are 59 percent disabled.

“A percentage disablement is also somewhat offensive,” she said. “Regardless of if it’s 10 percent or 59 percent or, Jamie, way over 60 percent, or dead — I guess that’s 100% disabled — there’s no compensation if you fall below that [60 percent].”.

“The consequence of being told, ‘sorry you’re only 55% disabled,’ it’s awful, it’s devastating and then there’s nothing for you, no one to help.”

Commenting on her testimony, Campbell asked, “How on earth can a clinician adjudicate someone is only 59 percent disabled? Why not 58? Why not 61? How can you be 59 percent disabled? I don’t understand that. I simply don’t understand it.”

Kate added, “Statistics are interesting, aren’t they? Within our group, [for] 100 percent of the people in it, [the vaccine] was not ‘safe and effective.’”

The group recommended that pharmaceutical companies should not fund the government agencies that regulate them. They also said the Yellow Card scheme — which is the U.K.’s adverse events reporting system for medicines, vaccines, medical devices and other products — should be mandatory rather than voluntary.

Kate also said the government should follow up when people file yellow cards. Many people in their group had filed cards, but no one ever contacted them to investigate.

“We are important,” she said. “We’re part of this pandemic story.”

Campbell asked, “Why is it that so many things only come to light from freedom of information requests?” He said it’s a pity these stories are not being picked up by the media. “Powerful testimony, not well-covered, unfortunately,” he said.

Watch here:

Republished with permission from Children’s Health Defense – Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

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