What are we doing to our children? Part 3: Is anyone accountable?

Written by Hugh McCarthy on May 11, 2023. Posted in Current News

The economic, health, educational and development damage wrought on the world by Covid policies, in particular on children and the poor, is now clear

World economies are bankrupt, inflation is rampant, educational and development damage is highlighted by UNESCO and Ofsted, and already-record waiting lists in hospitals and deaths from untreated illnesses are still increasing sharply.

Who is accountable?

The purpose of this article, which will partly reuse evidence first adduced in Parts 1 and 2, is to examine the wider impact of policies which have caused such devastation and ask the questions, were they fit for purpose?

And if not, is anyone accountable?

According to the World Bank, poverty is a major cause of ill health. The poor cannot afford to purchase those things that are needed for good health, including sufficient quantities of quality food and healthcare. Ill health, in turn, is a major cause of poverty.

This is partly due to the costs of seeking healthcare, which include out-of-pocket spending on care. It is also due to the considerable loss of income associated with illness in developing countries: both of the breadwinner and also of family members who may be obliged to stop working or attending school in order to take care of a sick relative.

The report goes on to say that strong health systems improve the health status of the whole population, but especially of the poor.

Health is key for resilient economies worldwide. As the UK and many countries across the world enter a period of recession caused by Covid policies, there will be more poor people and children whose health will deteriorate due to poverty.

Are we equipped to cater for increasing numbers of sick people?

The UK Government estimates that it spent two and a half times (£386 billion) its annual health budget (£140 billion) on Covid policies. David Bell and Carla Peters write:

Since Covid–19 was recognized in Western countries in early 2020, expenditures on public health in many of them have more than doubled, imposing over $500 billion in monthly costs on the global economy.

Some trillions more have been spent on compensation and stimulus packages for those left without income due to the public health response, whilst economies, and therefore future employment opportunities, have been heavily damaged.

This is nearly all funded by taxpayers, or borrowed to be funded with interest by the taxpayers of the future.

We have certainly created a generation concerned about their future. Dr Goldin states that teenagers exhibit the greatest worry about the future—they are worried about whether they’ll be able to get a job after they finish education.

The UK’s Consumer Prices Index (CPI) has risen by 9.0 percent in the 12 months to April 2022. Food and non-alcoholic beverage prices rose by 14.6 percent in the 12 months to September 2022, up from 13.1 percent in August.

Furthermore, the BBC reports that inflation is running at 10.1 percent, with the cost of living rising at the fastest rate for forty years. The former Bank of England Governor lays the blame for the state of the UK economy squarely at the feet of the lockdowns and the associated loose monetary policy.

Backlog

And what of the National Health Service? Is it able to deal with increasing numbers of sick people caused by poverty? Currently, British hospitals are cancelling more than 22,000 appointments every day, despite the Government’s pledge to clear the NHS backlog.

The British Medical Association reports (emphasis added):

More patients than ever are waiting for treatment and it will take years to clear the backlog.

The ongoing need for stringent infection prevention control measures and workforce shortages mean it will take even longer to work through as demand continues to rise.

Prior to the pandemic, in February 2020, there were already 4.43 million people on a waiting list for care.

The latest figures for July 2022 show a record number of over 6.84 million people waiting for treatment, with 2.67 million patients waiting over 18 weeks for treatment and 377,689 patients waiting over one year for treatment—over 365 times the merely 1,032 people who had been waiting for over a year before the pandemic, in July 2019.

Continued Covid disruption means more Britons are living with missed and untreated serious cancers, which will cause cancer deaths to shoot up within years, doctors have warned.

Rather than the prevalence of cancer declining in the population, more cancers were missed in 2020 as the country was plunged into an endless cycle of on/off lockdowns.

Cancer care effectively ground to a halt for some patients when the pandemic first reached the UK’s shores, with appointments cancelled and diagnostic scans delayed because of the Government’s devotion to ‘protecting’ the NHS.

Almost 40,000 cancers went undiagnosed during the first year of Covid, according to official statistics, which lay bare the catastrophic impact of the lockdowns, as experts fear this is just “the tip of the iceberg”, as reported in the Mail Online.

Indeed, the former Chief of the WHO cancer programmes, Professor Karol Sikora, referred to Covid policies as having left:

[…] an awful inheritance: 6.8 million people waiting for something from the NHS and they can’t get it.

And the situation in care homes is no better. The BBC reports regulators as saying that “the health and care system in England is gridlocked with patients at risk because they cannot access the support they need”.

The annual report by the Care Quality Commission warned that “the problem was creating long waits for ambulances and at Accident and Emergency”.

And the children are being hit hardest.

The waiting list for children is now growing at a faster rate than that for adults for the first time. Dr Kingdon, the President of the Royal College of Child and Paediatric Health, described the escalating waiting list as “very disturbing”.

There have been record hospital backlogs of child patients as ‘winter’ viruses spread into summer, and recent lockdowns resulted in children picking up illnesses that would have traditionally only appeared in winter months. The total number of children on NHS waiting lists has risen by almost 50 per cent in a year to a record high of 361,000.

Professor Heneghan and DrJefferson reported that care home deaths were, on average, 30% of the total Covid–19 deaths. They go onto say that:

Some of the deaths were a consequence of isolation, hunger and thirst. In a word, abandonment.

Over $3 trillion in wealth was transferred from the world’s poorest to a tiny number of billionaires and their supporters, predominantly in China and in the tech and pharmaceutical industries.

The situation across the world is alarming. A UNICEF report found that 150 million additional children will grow up in poverty—and, as I indicated earlier, poverty and health are inextricably linked.

Over 80 million children are missing routine childhood vaccination for diseases that actually kill them. The World Health Organisation reports that over 60,000 additional children died from malaria in 2020 alone. In the USA, the CDC reported that Emergency Department visits were 50.6 percent higher among girls aged 12–17 years due to suicide attempts.

The Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine reported that “suicide among children is the second leading cause of death among younger people aged 10-24 years and rising.” All this points to a huge deterioration in health and a decreasing capacity to cope caused by the health policies adopted by governments to address Covid–19.

Education is in a similar situation, both in terms of its financing and the attainment of the children, with the Guardian reporting on 24 October 2022 that nine out of ten schools in England will have run out of money by the next school year as the enormous burden of increased energy and salary bills takes its toll.

In November 2020, Ofsted, the body that inspects and reports on schools in England, reported that the majority of our children were going backwards educationally. Ofsted noted a regression in communication skills, physical development and independence, with the disadvantaged being disproportionately affected.

The most recent Ofsted report, in Spring 2022, highlighted the damaging effects of the restrictions on the development and learning of young children. For example:

• a generation of babies struggling to crawl and communicate;
• babies suffering delays in learning to walk;
• toddlers struggling to make friends;
• regression in children’s independence, e.g. unable to use the toilet independently;
• delays in speech and language.

And across the world the situation is equally alarming. A report issued in 2021 by UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank, revealingly titled The State of the Global Education Crisis, is particularly damning. It says:

School closures carry high social and economic costs for people across communities. The impact, however, is particularly severe for the most vulnerable and marginalised boys and girls and their families […]

Schooling provides essential learning and when schools close many children and young people miss out on the social contact that is essential to learning and development.

Robert Jenkins, UNICEF’s Head of Education, summed it up:

Quite simply, we are looking at a nearly insurmountable scale of loss to children’s schooling.

Therefore, it is evident that poverty is increasing and health and education are deteriorating due to the Covid restrictions followed by governments. I now turn to an examination of those policies.

The foundational tenets of governmental Covid policies appear to be:

1. Children are at risk from Covid
2. Children are a danger to others through transmission
3. Asymptomatic transmission is serious
4. The PCR test is an appropriate tool to identify children who were infected and infectious
5. Closing schools reduces spread
6. Lockdowns reduce spread
7. Vaccines reduce child mortality
8. Masks reduce spread
9. Vaccine passports reduce spread
10. Ventilators saved lives

Did the policies work? And if not, who is responsible for the huge damage they caused?

1. Are children are at risk?

Was the virus deadly to those on whom the restrictions were being placed? Children have a 99.9987 percent chance of surviving Covid, based on a study published by Professor John Ioannidis.

According to Professor Norman Fenton, a world-leading expert on risk assessment and statistics with the University of London. “No healthy children died in the UK in 2020”: of the eight children who died, seven had life-threatening conditions and the remaining one had a very serious condition.

Whilst every death is tragic, an ONS report shows that only two children under 18 died from Covid during 2021. Furthermore, in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Canada, Ireland and Iceland no healthy child has died of Covid.

The Canada Health Alliance reports that “Without a serious pre-existing medical condition, the risk of death is statistically zero”. In the US, analysis of the FDA’s data shows the risk of any child dying of Covid–19 is 0.000015. In fact, Dr Paul Alexander reports that “there had been no deaths of healthy children in the US.”

Steve Kirsch states:

I have never found a healthy child who has died from Covid, not in any country.

Finally, according to research published by the US Government’s National Institute of Health, for children aged 5–11 years without co-morbidities, the case fatality rate could not be calculated due to an absence of cases. That about sums up the risk to children.

2. Are children a danger to others through transmission?

Children do not transmit the virus, said Professor Mark Woolhouse, a member of SAGE, in an article published in the Daily Mail in August 2020. Professor Woolhouse said:

There are thousands and thousands of transmission events that have been inferred [from contact tracing]—out of all those thousands, still we can’t find a single one involving a child transmitting to a teacher in a classroom.

It has been stated that children “aren’t taking it home and transferring it to the community.” According to Shamez Ladhani of Public Health England, “Kids have very little capacity to infect household members.” The Canada Health Alliance also reported that children do not pass the disease to teachers, parents, grandparents, or other adults.

3. Is asymptomatic transmission a major cause for concern?

In a detailed presentation on transmission of infectious diseases at the Question Everything conference in July 2021, Dr Clare Craig confirmed there had been “no cases of anyone needing medical care having caught Covid from a person with no symptoms”.

Pandata is equally clear:

There is no evidence that asymptomatic people are significant drivers of transmission of SARS-CoV-2, nor is there evidence that isolating asymptomatic people who have a positive PCR test for Covid–19 provides any benefit.

4. Is the PCR test a sufficiently robust tool to assess infection?

The World Health Organization issued global PCR testing guidance—using tests later confirmed by the New York Times to have a false positive rate over 85 percent—pursuant to which millions of cases were soon discovered in every country leading to lockdowns, school closures and the general closure of businesses.

Dr Kary Mullis, the Nobel prizewinning inventor of the PCR test, asserts that “it doesn’t tell you you are sick, and it doesn’t tell you you are infectious”.

In addition, Professor Jack Lambert, Ireland’s leading infectious disease expert, has said:

PCR cannot distinguish infectious live virus from residual dead virus or viral fragments from previous infection.

Therefore many ‘cases’ have no real meaning in terms of medical status or transmission potential.

Professor Lambert goes on to say:

It will probably identify harmless viral fragments and the test will be deemed ‘positive’.

In Ireland, cycle threshold (Ct) value cut-offs of 35–45 are the norm. High Ct values (over 35 or even 30) suggest a non-infectious patient.

Yet we have been applying a cycle frequency in the range 40–45.

Professor Richard Ennos of Edinburgh University expressed the following in the Belfast Newsletter:

In short, the PCR test is completely useless for the purpose for which it is being employed—namely the detection of Covid–19 infected individuals who can infect others.

Furthermore, since children are hardly affected, and show vanishingly small frequencies of transmission to adults, there is no reason to be worried about SARS–CoV–2 passing through children at school.

Therefore, the PCR test results are completely inappropriate for providing evidence of whether there is an outbreak in a school.

As Doctor Ros Jones, a retired NHS Consultant Paediatrician, speaking on the Pandemic podcast on 26 January 2022, succinctly said:

The closure of schools [was] for no good reason.

5 & 6. Did lockdowns and school closures reduce spread?

Research carried out by the University of Edinburgh which asked the question, What is the evidence for transmission of Covid–19 by children [or in schools]?, concluded that:

a) no high quality studies directly addressing the study question were identified, and
b) no confirmed evidence or reports of paediatric cases as the main source of infection.

In August 2020, a report by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) concluded that children were much less likely to contract the virus. It states that:

Re-opening schools had not been associated with significant increases in community transmission.

An article published in 2021 in the British Medical Journal states that:

The emerging consensus is that schools do not seem to be amplifiers of transmission, and that cases in schools simply reflect prevalence within the local community.

Research from Germany indicates that school closures did not contain the spread of the coronavirus.

In addition, 24 peer-reviewed research papers show that Lockdowns have a negligible effect on fatalities. A meta-analysis carried out by Professors Herby, Jonung and Hanke amounts to a damning indictment of the policy failure. They found that:

There is no evidence of a noticeable relationship between the most-used NPIs [non-pharmaceutical interventions] and Covid–19. Overall, lockdowns and limiting gatherings seem to increase Covid–19 mortality.

This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here ukcolumn.org

Header image: BBC

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