Two years into this pandemic, we know something crucial that we didn’t know at its start: Children, miraculously, face a negligible risk for severe outcomes from Covid-19. And yet kids—from preschool to university—have borne the burden of our most draconian policies. While the rest of us have returned to bars and restaurants, pre-schoolers are still in masks. The Los Angeles school district announced last Friday that “masking will be required at all times, indoors and outdoors.”
The extent to which Covid policies have disrupted the social, intellectual and emotional growth of American kids—including some of the poorest and most vulnerable—is among the most morally urgent issues right now. (Leading doctors and public health experts agree: See this useful toolkit for parents just released by Dr. Lucy McBride and others.)
Were these measures necessary? Is the current cure worse than the disease itself? How are young people really doing? And what should concerned parents and teachers do to help?
On Monday, January 31st, at 8 PM EST/5 PM PST, I’ll be asking these questions and many more to three people who have skin in the game: AJ Kay, Jane Kitchen, and Alex Gutentag.
AJ Kay is a writer and mom of four who currently serves as managing editor of Collateral Global.
Jane Kitchen is a 19-year-old undergraduate student who recently transferred to Hillsdale College.
Alex Gutentag is a public school teacher in California and a columnist at Tablet.
This event is co-sponsored by Tablet and is part of their monthly series called “The Turn,” which focuses on the political homelessness of our current moment. If you missed the first event in the series, with Liel Leibovitz and Walter Kirn, you can catch it here.
Usually, events like these are accessible to paid subscribers only, but this time we’re opening the door to all of you. Capacity for the room is 3,000 people. If we hit that number—I hope we do!—and you can’t get in, don’t worry: We’ll be sharing a recording of the event.
As always, we want to hear from you. So please come with questions in mind.
Here’s the Zoom information:
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
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I appreciate you bringing attention to it, but the reality is that kids are going to continue to be discarded in one form or another until people stop voting for Democrats. There is an easy solution for the adults who actually care - stop using your vote to actively empower people whose policies harm children. Now that many admit to knowing better, why aren’t they choosing better?
While my heart is broken for what Democrats have done to my children’s generation, I don’t feel the least bit guilty, nor should I, for sending my kids to an academically elite private Christian school that focused on the kids (in-person), minimized Covid damage and refuses to harm students with idiotic neo-racist and gender ideology. I don’t feel guilty because I voted for and advocate for every child to have the exact same choice.
Bari - the CDC released and NIH meta analysis on masks in May 2020 which found that despite their theoretical usefulness, mask don’t work. Italy gave the world a huge amount of data in April 2020 which showed kids were at low risk of a bad outcome from Covid, and rarely spread it to adults.
Maybe if leftist hadn’t spend the last 21 months calling those of us who read actual studies, and look at actual data, tables “heartless grandma killers” you all wouldn’t look so ridiculous now claiming “we know so much more now than we did then.” We know more now but we knew a lot then. Power hungry Democrats, lying media, and profit hungry big tech suppressed and censored the information, but it was and is out there for anyone willing to spend the time looking at it.
Far too many people who are still Democrats today were simply too lazy to look at the information for themselves. Many who did look at it have justly left the Democrat party. Most of the world, and many places in the US, had returned young children to school on or before August 2020. Most of the world never masked 9 year olds, much less 2 year olds.
The Democrats own their choices and no one gets to hide behind “we didn’t know.” Being too lazy to learn or listen, preferring to insult and attack those of us advocating for truth, is absolutely no excuse to harm children and destroy society. But, until more people who vote for Democrats gain the intestinal fortitude to admit they are humans and they were wrong, and until those people stop listening to the very people who lied to them for over 20 months, the harm will continue and the conversations complaining about it will remain useless except oars yo make some of the adults who voted for it feel better about themselves despite the harm they are inflicting on innocent kids.
“WE” meaning, all the sane people, the people who werent already marginally psychotic, those of us without already high levels of anxiety, low levels of self esteem, those of us who werent economically illiterate and politically naive, KNEW ALL of this after about 2-3 months into the pandemic. I myself, an anarcho-cap libertarian and all the limited constitutional government types and traditional conservatives, … all knew that covid just isnt that dangerous to all but the old sick and infirm. We all knew that the federal gov of the US and in fact most state gov have no moral or legal justification for concerning themselves with health related matters.
Its not just that the mitigation methods were ineffective, they were actively harmful.
Masks do NOTHING, nothing, nothing and never did. Lockdowns and school closures were doomed to fail and completely unnecessary. Business closures were a disaster. Everything the government has done was doomed to fail and it did. This was and is predictable because government DESTROYS everything it touches. Its a law of nature.
Just because a government steals a bunch of money from private citizens and uses it to "hire" and a bunch of scientists and build a big building and put some fancy sign on the building that says "centers for disease control" , doesnt mean that this group knows anything or is right about everything.
There are many examples of gov paying off a bunch of "expert" and giving them fancy offices at our expense and having these groups be miserable abject failures.
Some examples: congress, the senate, scotus, the post office, the social security and medicare, large portions of the military, the dept of energy, transportation, the IRS... OMG the IRS... and so many more.
The CDC is just another failed US bureaucracy.
The left and progressives have no ideas, are morally bankrupt, have no idea what it takes to build and maintain a free prosperous society and worship power. The have weaponized the executive level bureaucracies like the CDC to punish their political enemies; hence the mask mandates, vax mandates. These things are simple craven sadistic obedience rituals. And our children are caught in the crosshairs.
So it wonderful that you have decided to come over to team reality. Hopefully its not too little too late.