We should end mask mandates and social distancing in most settings not because they don’t slow the spread—the usual argument against such measures—but because they probably do.
In a prior essay, I discussed how the We Want Them Infected movement is trying to rebrand itself as the All We Really Wanted Was Poor Kids in School movement. With their assurances that the mass infection of unvaccinated youth would lead to herd immunity in 3-6 months in tatters, pro-infection doctors are now furiously trying to rewrite history, portraying themselves as nothing more than selfless warriors for children and their education.
The facts tell a different story.
As child labor laws loosen across the country, many pro-infection doctors were eager to join forces with an unapologetic pro-tobacco, child-labor advocate who encourages children to dropout of school. It was a surreal experience to be sanctimoniously lectured about the importance of education by doctors who partnered with this man, especially considering they devoted great effort not to ensuring that schools could safely reopen, but by ensuring that when children returned to school, they faced the virus without any protections at all. They saturated the media with articles such as The Case Against Covid Tests for the Young and Healthy, The Ill-Advised Push to Vaccinate the Young, and The Downsides of Masking Young Students Are Real, and Kids Don’t Need Covid-19 Vaccines to Return to School.
If all these doctors cared about was children learning in classrooms, as they now claim, shouldn’t they have wanted healthy students learning from healthy teachers? Shouldn’t they have wanted cautious parents to feel their children were safe at school too? Why did they devote their entire pandemic effort to removing the most trivial mitigation measures, even after schools were open?
As I previously discussed, pro-infection doctors didn’t object to these measures because they doubted whether they slowed the virus, but precisely because they knew that’s exactly what they did. Remember, they felt it was “fantastic” when cases spiked in unvaccinated young people, and in articles such as Herd Immunity is Still Key in the Fight Against Covid-19, they expressed great gratitude- “thank you, thank you, thank you“- to those who “generate herd immunity by living normal lives“. They produced pro-virus content, such as the article Should We Let Children Catch Omicron?, which said:
Parents must consider that exposures are how we best protect our children against the variants of the future. In fact, it is reckless to let children age into a more serious encounter with a disease best dealt with while younger… Shielding kids from exposure only increases their future risk… For children, getting sick and recovering is part of a natural and healthy life… Exposures are how we best protect our children against the variants of the future… Immunity is built through illness.
This article also advocated removing mitigation all measures because this would allow children to get sick. It said:
Dropping masks, quarantines, distancing, and all other mitigations will allow children to develop the kind of broad immunity gained by living a normal life.
These doctors lamented that mitigation measures just “postponed the inevitable”, and as early as March 2020 said:
School closures may also diminish the chances of developing herd immunity in an age group that is spared serious disease.
In an article titled Slow the Spread? Speeding It May Be Safer from January 2022, the deadliest month of the pandemic for children, Dr. Apoorva Ramaswamy gave the game away entirely writing:
We should end mask mandates and social distancing in most settings not because they don’t slow the spread—the usual argument against such measures—but because they probably do.
I didn’t want to go to school. I just wanted to stay at home.
Of course, letting the virus rip in schools didn’t help children’s education. Sick children couldn’t learn, and sick teachers couldn’t teach. During the Omicron wave, 30% of New York City students were absent. According to one article:
New York City students are missing school in record numbers — staying home in droves because they’re sick, quarantined, fearful of getting COVID-19 in class or don’t see the point of going because so many others are absent, families and educators told the Daily News.
Elsewhere, the National Guard was called to act as substitute teachers during the peak of Omicron wave, and desperate principals begged parents to act as substitute teachers. Unsurprisingly, at many points in the pandemic, overwhelming COVID outbreaks shuttered schools, not just in blue states, but also in Florida, Arkansas, Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma, Kentucky , Alabama, Georgia, Wyoming, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, North Dakota, Tennessee, Kansas, West Virginia, Missouri, Louisiana, and Mississippi. I urge you to read one of these articles to learn about the challenges educators faced because the virus sickened their students and staff. A typical article titled 2 Tennessee School Districts Temporarily Close Due to COVID from September 2021 said:
Of the 2,444 cases reported from Aug. 17 to 30 in Sumner County, 868 were among school-age children between 5 and 18 years old, according to the Tennessee Department of Health.
It also said:
Pediatric COVID-19 admissions have also surged and school mask mandates have become the center of debates, especially as children under the age of 12 are still not eligible for the vaccine. On average, nearly 340 children are now seeking hospital care for COVID-19 each day, according to the latest government data.
Despite this, some doctors with no real-world responsibility for opening schools falsely portrayed all viral-induced school closures as a “decision“. They said it was a “mistake” to have closed schools, implying that if only they were in charge, everything would have been just fine and dandy. Somehow, they would have overcome teacher shortages and sick children in ways no one else figured out, even while hospitals up the street were using forklifts to move these children’s older relatives into overflowing morgues.
In reality, of course, the virus forced people with actual responsibility to make hard, often unpopular choices. Indeed, another article titled Four Kansas School Districts Temporarily Close As COVID-19 Outbreaks Hit 31 Schools reported:
“With the rise in Covid numbers in our staff and student population, as well as in our county, the board was forced to make adjustments,” the district said in a Facebook post Tuesday. “One of those adjustments includes the requirement to wear masks while case numbers are high.”
These local officials didn’t want to “make adjustments”, the virus forced them, and they faced furious backlash and outright threats because of this.
Much like “protect the vulnerable” and “do an RCT“, writing the words “open schools” was much easier than actually opening schools, especially when the virus was allowed to spread freely. Yet, some doctors are genuinely proud of the many times they merely “called for” schools to open.
Beyond this, children who lost a parent to COVID, an estimated 245,000 of them in the US, struggled too. In New York City, 8,600 children, or 1 in 200 children, lost a parent or caregiver in the pandemic’s first two years. After her father died of COVID, 15-year-old Elizabeth George said, “I didn’t want to go to school. I just wanted to stay at home.”
Most tragically, dead children will never learn again, and dead teachers will never teach again. One article from September 2021 was titled Child Covid Deaths More Than Doubled In Florida As Kids Returned To The Classroom. In New York City alone, 74 educators, including 30 teachers, died in the pandemic’s first couple of months. Even after vaccines were available, headlines read 15 Miami-Dade Educators Die From COVID-19 in 10 Days. There would have been many more such tragedies had the virus been allowed to infect 73 million children at the start of the pandemic as some doctors proposed.
The bigger problem is that lockdowners like Howard (an NYU doctor, I think), think that living your life is an irresponsible act. Sending your kids to school is an irresponsible act.
It turns out that not all disruptions to education were because liberal politicians, beholden to teacher’s unions, made cowardly choices. The virus massively disrupted schools around the world, including Sweden. However, the simple statement “it’s bad that the virus closed schools” was also a controversial statement. Those of us who did nothing more than acknowledge this obvious reality were subject to juvenile taunts- “fringe scientists“- and absurdly accused of actively advocating for school closures. Pro-infection doctors inhabited a world of magical thinking where anyone who recognized the virus’s impact on schools was held responsible for it. For example, one pro-infection doctor, who did not read my book, wrote a fake review of it in which he said:
The bigger problem is that lockdowners like Howard (an NYU doctor, I think), think that living your life is an irresponsible act. Sending your kids to school is an irresponsible act.
Of course, I never said “sending your kids to school is an irresponsible act“, but intellectual honesty was besides the point for pro-infection doctors. I sinned by suggesting that the mass infection of children might also disrupt their education.
The purpose of blaming the messenger was of course, to silence and discredit the messenger. Pro-infection doctors had a vested interest in obscuring what the virus did to education, and they felt virtuous for their open refusal to acknowledge its impact. Indeed, nothing the virus did to schools, or children or teachers, seemed to matter to them. They certainly never advocated for better control of the virus so that schools that were forced to close by it could safely reopen. They greeted COVID’s harms to education with either complete indifference or absurd misinformation, falsely claiming that the flu killed more children than COVID, and that:
Teachers were actually at lower risk of COVID than the population of other workers at large. Being around kids actually protected them, in some sense, because the kids are not super-spreaders.
I wonder how teachers feel knowing their pandemic experience was discussed in such a blasé manner by laptop class doctors who wisely avoided the virus until after they were vaccinated.
It’s all enough to make one think that children learning in classrooms wasn’t the main priority for pro-infection doctors. Rather, their chief objective was to infect as many children as quickly as possible to hasten the arrival of herd immunity, and schools were just a tool to accomplish this goal- a goal they shared with their wealthy libertarian friend who told kids to dropout of public schools so they can smoke after their shift at Walmart and Chic-Fil-A.
