“I’m not talking about they made a mistake, I’m talking about misciting. Academic misconduct.”
The Urgency of Normal (UON) was founded in January 2022 by doctors who will be familiar to SBM readers, including Drs. Tracy Beth Høeg, Monica Gandhi, Lucy McBride, and Vinay Prasad, as well as Allison Krug. The UON felt mitigation measures for children did more harm than good and described itself by saying:
We are a group of scientists and pediatric, infectious disease, emergency, mental health, and ICU doctors concerned that COVID-19 mitigation measures for children are doing more harm than good. Health must be viewed holistically— yet school policymakers have narrowly defined “safety” as the mere absence of COVID, putting children into a loop of mitigation measures that are uncoupled from actual risk. After two years of living with one disruption after another, the toll on children’s mental and physical health is increasingly evident and alarming. To protect them, an urgent return to fully normal life and schooling is needed.
None of this was new for them. They all said the exact same thing the previous year in videos such as The Motivation We Need to Reach the End of the COVID-19 Pandemic, How To Stop Living In Fear of COVID, and How A Coming End To The Pandemic Is Causing Anxiety. The UON was stale material by doctors who never changed their tune, no matter what the virus did.
Predictably, their material contained many basic errors, all of which understated the harms of COVID and overstated the risks of mitigations. For example, even though a single child died of the flu in the 2020-2021 season and COVID killed around 600 children, the UON nonetheless said that “COVID is a flu-like risk for unvaccinated children“. This is the “nuance” and integrity they brought to their work, and according to an article titled Why Is This Group of Doctors So Intent on Unmasking Kids?:
Tyler Black, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and suicidologist at BC Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, hadn’t heard anything about the Urgency of Normal group or its “tool kit” until it came out. But when he saw it go up on Twitter, he was appalled. “Their document was so poor, with so many mistakes, that it required immediate public correction,” he said…
“It was really, really gross to see what they did with the mental health science. It’s a true perversion of what science communication is supposed to be,” Black said. “They had mis-cited the CDC—I’m not talking about they made a mistake, I’m talking about mis-citing. Academic misconduct.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found that there was no significant increase in child suicide, yet the group used that study to claim the opposite—an increase in suicide. After pushback, the authors edited the tool kit to remove that mention of suicide, he said, without noting what had been revised…
The bottom line about kids’ mental health in the pandemic, Black said, is that “when we ask kids, just as many say that they’re doing better as say that they’re doing worse, and most kids say that their mental health has not changed during the pandemic.” Black is concerned that the authors of the Urgency of Normal tool kit may be miscommunicating the evidence on other topics as well. “They’re picking the science that makes their point, and that by the very definition is extremely biased, unreliable science.”
Indeed, an article from 2023, Teen Suicide Plummeted During Covid-19 School Closures, New Study Finds, reported that:
Rates of suicide and suicide attempts among teenagers were at their lowest when schools were closed for the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I sorry, Mommy. Mommy hugs, I scared. I don’t like it. Mommy!”
It’s important to remember what was happening in January 2022 when the UON launched their crusade against mitigations. That month was the peak of the Omicron wave, the most devastating for children, when around 900 were being hospitalized daily with COVID. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics
The largest peak was in winter 2022 during the omicron surge, with 6,527 child hospitalizations the week of Jan. 15.
The youngest children, those too young vaccinated, were the hardest hit. According to an article titled Not So Mild? Hospitalizations Exploding Among Utah Infants, Children with COVID-19′s Omicron Strain:
“I sorry, Mommy. Mommy hugs, I scared. I don’t like it. Mommy!”
Those were the last words 3-year-old Justin Lee Francis spoke to his mother, Yvonne, before he was sedated and put on a ventilator at Primary Children’s Hospital last week, when he was diagnosed with COVID-19, asthma, pneumonia and other illnesses.
“Those words are burned in my memory,” Yvonne Francis said Thursday from the hospital, where Justin Lee still is on a ventilator, still sedated, and slowly recovering after nearly a week in the intensive care unit. “He was really scared.”
This was also the deadliest part of the pandemic for children as Melody Shreiber’s discussed in her article A Fifth of All US Child COVID Deaths Occurred During Omicron Surge. 179 children died in the first 10 weeks of 2022, and this all would have been much worse had we all listened to the UON at the time.
“U.S. Schools Close in Droves as Omicron Drives Staff Shortages”
Schools were affected too. As happened whenever the virus spread uncontrolled, they were forced to closed. An article titled U.S. Schools Close in Droves as Omicron Drives Staff Shortages reported:
School closings are accelerating across the U.S. as omicron infections ensnare teachers and drive staffing shortages.
The speed of this Covid-19 surge led large districts like Atlanta, Detroit, and Prince George’s County in Maryland to adopt remote instruction just days into the new year, often leaving parents little time to readjust schedules.
Nationally, the number of in-person closings has tripled since Dec. 19 as the percentage of positive tests surged. At least 3,229 schools were closed in the first week of January.
Even when schools were open, this did not mean necessarily mean students were learning in them. An article from January 2022 titled COVID Hammers NYC School Attendance Among Students and Teachers reported:
The omicron surge is taking a toll on attendance in public schools all over New York City. Student attendance was 76% on Monday, the Department of Education told FOX 5 NY.
“The mental, social, emotional & behavioral health of our children.”
Many people read about overwhelmed pediatric hospitals and closed schools at the time and worried about the mental, social, emotional, and behavioral health of our children. Not the UON doctors, however. None of this bothered them at all. Though they claimed to view children’s health “holistically”, they had their own agenda and were happy to use children to advance it.
It turns out that the UON was only worried about the mental, social, emotional, and behavioral health of our children in relation to COVID mitigations. They wanted them gone and thus claimed that removing them was the one and only key to improving the mental, social, emotional, and behavioral health of our children. No other problems needed addressing. This was all that was needed.
A typical X post of theirs from March 2022 said:
The impact on the mental, social, emotional & behavioral health of our children can’t be measured by a PCR [test],” said @etholland71. “We are so laser-focused on the burden of disease, but the burden of the mitigation measures is high.”
They linked to an article titled Student Masking Now Up to Parents featuring Dr. Eliza Holland that said:
Holland is one of a national group of physicians and scientists who have formed an all-volunteer organization called the Urgency of Normal, which launched in January and advocates for maintaining in-person learning, de-escalating the fear around getting Covid, and appropriately balancing the risks to children’s health. “Right now, we are seeing a mental health crisis in our children, which was already bad and has only gotten worse during the pandemic,” said Holland. “I have admitted far more children with severe eating disorders, suicidal ideation, and drug overdose than I have with severe Covid.”
The Urgency of Normal’s summary of the evidence to date on student masking efficacy says that “[w]ell-controlled, real-world studies have not demonstrated any clear benefit of masking students.” While a widely circulated CDC study found a higher Covid incidence among students in Georgia schools that did not require masks, the difference was found to be not statistically significant. Other studies did not control for important confounding variables such as vaccination rates among students. “When an intervention’s real-world benefits are too small to measure, we should feel comfortable ending its use,” concludes the summary.
On the other side of the ledger, Holland notes that masking creates real impediments. “Masking makes it hard to understand each other and one’s teacher, and difficult for children with speech issues to be understood,” she said. “It’s harder for children for whom English is a second language to communicate, and children with special needs who can’t comply with mask mandates are being left out of the school environment.”
Holland said she has observed that children have been taught to feel unsafe without a mask, and that those anxieties may take a longer-term toll. “The health messaging has been lacking in nuance, and the risk stratification has not been well portrayed,” she said. “Unvaccinated children are still at much lower risk of severe disease and hospitalization than vaccinated adults.” As well, transmission rates among children are much lower than among adults, according to CDC data.
“Children are treated as if they are horrible spreaders, and they are the ones who must continue to mask as if they are a threat to everyone around them,” even as adults are allowed to unmask, said Holland. “As some of my colleagues have said, the impact on the mental, social, emotional, and behavioral health of our children can’t be measured by a PCR [test],” said Holland. “We are so laser-focused on the burden of disease, but the burden of the mitigation measures is high.”
Though Dr. Holland complained that “children are treated as if they are horrible spreaders,” a headline from the next year read More Than 70% of US Household COVID Spread Started with a Child, Study Suggests. Meanwhile, while Dr. Holland dunked on mitigations, other UON leaders acted as publicity agents for the virus and extolled its virtues. Dr. Prasad and Krug wrote an article on February 2, 2022, titled Should We Let Children Catch Omicron?, in which they said COVID infections were “natural and healthy” for children. They wrote:
These measures are premised on the idea that America’s children must be shielded from exposure to Covid-19. What kids really need, however, is a return to normal. And when it comes to infectious disease, normality means a world where they are routinely exposed to, and overcome, viral illness. For children, getting sick and recovering is part of a natural and healthy life.
It is important to emphasise that a more laissez-faire approach to kids and Covid makes public health sense, too. Dropping masks, quarantines, distancing, and all other mitigations will allow children to develop the kind of broad immunity gained by living a normal life.
Dr. Prasad and Krug also endorsed using infected children as human shields for older adults. They wrote:
Shielding kids from exposure only increases their future risk. This is partly why the UK does not vaccinate against chickenpox. Serious complications from the disease are rare among children, and the circulating virus allows adults to be naturally boosted against reactivation-driven shingles. By rebuilding population immunity among the least at-risk, moreover, we help buffer risk for those most vulnerable.
The UK has since started vaccinating for chickenpox, however no one at the UON had any concern that a severe case of COVID or losing a parent or teacher to the virus might impact the mental, social, emotional & behavioral health of our children. None at all.
“I think 2-3 years to remove Red Dye #3 is bullshit.”
A lot’s happened since January 2022. COVID is still shuttering schools and children still have mental health problems. However, you wouldn’t know about any of this from the UON. Their final social media post was on January 16, 2025, when they shared a typically juvenile diatribe by Dr. Prasad. He wrote about threats to children as he saw them and how he hoped the US would respond. He boasted of the randomized trials he “would” do and the videos he planned on making. He said:
I think the US should be extremely conservative when it comes to exposing us to uncertain chemicals that are banned in other parts of the world in our food, cosmetics, and furniture. (Red dye #3 was banned from lipstick for 35 years, but not gummy bears)
I think 2-3 years to remove Red Dye #3 is bullshit. It should happen ASAP. Lots of other chemicals can go. I would adopt a US philosophy of: if it is toxic anywhere, it is toxic here.
To substantively improve American’s health, I think you have to be honest and say being fat is bad for your health. It’s terrible for your health. Healthy at all body sizes is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. US med schools are deranged.
The built environment needs to be changed so people walk more, move more.
Subsidies to corn and other garbage agricultural products that pump people full of highly refined carbohydrates and low value calories needed to be completely cut.
If subsidies are introduced in the market, and these can be debated, they should be introduced for fruits and vegetables, and studied
Effort should be made to explore be the implications of teaching people about cooking and food culture more broadly. I would conduct randomized experiments.
The NIH budget is being spent on shit. Probably 2/3 of NIH funding is spent on the dumbest research possible. Not the most important human health priorities. It can all be cut and repurposed. NIH funded a study to increase CT screening in homeless people with substance abuse issues– NIH has been run incompetently.
School lunch programs and school nutrition need to be completely revamped. We feed kids dog food. IT is disgraceful. A sign of a failed country is to close kids schools and feed them dog food. US doesn’t value children enough.
Also we should not need to be giving 12 year olds Ozempic. That is crazy.
Many things need to be done. But the US should be the nation that says: if it’s toxic anywhere. It’s toxic here too. I have a few videos I making on this topic that I’ll be posting soon.
While Dr. Prasad portrayed red dye #3 as a grave threat to children, he did not even mention their mental, social, emotional & behavioral health.
Four days after this, on January 20, 2025, Trump took the oath of office, and the moment that happened, the UON vanished. Poof. Their previously prolific X feed became a silent ghost town.
Today, they are reading the same headlines as you and I. However, from ICE raids to the weakening of child labor laws, nothing has stirred them to express the slightest bit of concern about the mental, social, emotional, and behavioral health of our children. With MAHA/MAGA in power and COVID mitigations gone, so is their concern.
Obviously, genuine concern is consistent concern, and the silence from the UON about literally everything happening today is clarifying. It reveals just how sincere they were about the mental, social, emotional, and behavioral health of our children back in January 2022, when COVID raged and mitigations against it were the only problems children supposedly faced.