There is no question mitigation was good, but political and corporate media pressure to keep the world locked down and terrified into 2022 was always immunologically suspect. Many lives their lost due to the pandemic, some lost their lives because it was suggested people should not seek medical care due to imagery of COVID bodies stacked in parking lots, but a whole lot of damage won't be known for a decade or more.
Though children were impacted very little from a disease point of view, especially compared to those with actual co-morbidities, it was suggested if they did not comply their grandparents would die. It was a dramatic turn. In February, California Governor Newsom suggested President Trump was racist for telling airlines to stop travel from Wuhan, but a few weeks later flipped and said no one could get a haircut because of viral shedding.(1) Schools had to be closed.
The only unquantifiable argument to be made for government-union-controlled education is 'socialization' and that was suddenly gone. Everyone home schooled, the thing that an entire pedagogical industry in America had long said was very bad. Very few talked about what that might mean, we continued to get non-stop blasts of epidemiological correlations, while actual experts kept quiet for fear they might get their grant funding pulled.
We're seeing some impact already. ACT scores haven't been so low since the Clinton era, a dismal period that caused his successor to create the only real improvement in education of the last 70 years - No Child Left Behind - which the next Democrat to follow Clinton then dismantled for the same reason President Obama canceled NASA's Constellation program - no programs with a Republican name on them allowed. The Common Core he replaced it with, manufactured by the unions that give 93 percent of their campaign donations to his party, is partially responsible for the lingering drift back to poor results.
But some of the decline is because mental health issues persist in young people. The education complex has made it easier than ever to graduate high school, you basically have to quit or try to fail not to get a diploma now, but universities are worried that the quality they got(2) is also at an all-time low. Why will young people care about education if a new COVID-19 strain, we might as well call it the Election24 variant at this point, means education won't matter, you could die anyway?
The Biden administration's response it to throw more money at government union employees, and he is saying by 2025 there will be results.
Four years after he took office - an entire generation of high school students sacrificed for unknown benefit.
I get that it is easy to be a 'Monday Morning Quarterback' but many saw this coming and I am not and never was a COVID denier. I was on Team SARS-CoV-2 Concern when US Democrats and the World Health Organisation were insisting it was not a pandemic at all, when New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was telling residents to rush to fill bars for one last drink because the xenophobic Trump administration was making him shut the city down.(3) But because science is my north star, not the politics that has infected so many science academics and journalists, I later called out the stupidity of telling people to flip masks up and down between bites of food in a restaurant or on a plane. I was right, those efforts saved no one, anyone claiming they saved virtual lives is writing science-fiction.(4)
The entire time I said we would be doing a huge disservice to young people by gutting schools. We owe them for what we allowed to happen because we didn't want to go against media and political sentiment, and it is a debt we may never be able to repay.
NOTES:
(1) Unless he was in Napa at the French Laundry restaurant, where an outraged employee busted him and his party not wearing masks and he rationalized it by saying there wasn't a lot of COVID-19 in Napa. Despite claiming they were on Team Science, politicians know so little they assumed that masks were to protect politicians, not others, when to restaurants in Napa - forced to wear masks while serving the Governor and his fellow elites - him driving to their town meant he was carrying possible infections from Sacramento, in addition to those carried by the lobbyists and health care insiders he brought.
(2) In California alone, taxpayers give government money to give to government employees totaling a whopping $129 billion, $24,000 per student. During the pandemic, teachers still went on strike for raises.
(3) A few weeks later the same Trump that Democrats claimed was trying to cripple New York ordered a hospital ship out of maintenance using an emergency executive order and rushed it to the city because NYC was overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases, after refusing to cut airline travel and encouraging people to go to bars.
(4) Viruses don't work that way, nor do masks after the first time you take them down. Everyone knew this, before politicians started using viruses as an election-year weapon.
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