By attempting to cocoon both adolescents and young adults to protect them from bad choices, responsibility, and real-world consequences for their decisions until they reach a scientifically defined age at which they can enter the world fully mature and unsupervised, we will in fact be protracting their immaturity and delaying their development into the responsible adults we are waiting for them to become.
Occasionally there was a suggestion that socially-distanced outdoor interactions might be acceptable or that phased school reopenings could be attempted. But, by and large, very few mental health professionals, like so many people from so many other fields, had the courage to present any real challenge to these policies despite knowing the damage they wrought.
For many, living in a state of constant surveillance seems only natural – especially for younger generations that have lived their lives online and have had their every movement since childhood tracked by their parents through their phones to ensure their safety. News of government doing the same, although sometimes with fancier tools like automatic license plate readers and facial recognition, no longer even causes a stir.
What were the cumulative health effects of encouraging, coercing, and forcing large populations into states of prolonged social isolation while simultaneously instilling in them intense fear and inflicting upon them economic uncertainty and hardship? What will the long-term effects of this be? And how could our public health experts not have considered that doing this to a social mammal might have been bad for their health?
Many of those who claim to represent science are no longer objective. Science educators teach orthodoxy. Science communicators openly engage in blatant marketing campaigns. Scientific consensuses are manufactured when needed. All of these components in how scientific knowledge is disseminated and how trust in science is built are now tools to advance and support official policy. All have become ghosts of what they used to be.
Eight leading critics of the United States’s COVID-19 response have called for an investigation of the many failures of policy architects and key decision makers — at institutions ranging from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration to universities and hospitals — over their repeated mishandling of the pandemic.
Countless people from all walks of life have found themselves lost in a shared Kafkaesque dream since the dawn of the Pandemic Era nearly three years ago, yet, what makes accounts such as those contained here particularly jarring is that these students were not simply contending with a class of administrative automotons, as many have, but with well-trained, well-educated biologists – the kind of people one might have initially expected to put up the greatest resistance to illogical and scientifically unsound Covid policies.
On the other side of the fourth wall, the confrontation between Lawson and Doc Tracy, played by former UCLA anesthesiologist, Dr. Christopher Rake, took place on December 6, 2021. Two days later on December 8, Lawson took to Twitter to condemn Rake and the medical freedom organization that produced the show, America’s Frontline Doctors, then went on a media blitz the following week, making appearances on CNN and MSNBC to characterize the confrontation as an attempt to intimidate and terrorize.
If you’re an artist and you’re trying to grow your Instagram following and you start posting anything that calls into doubt like ‘The Science,’ you’re going to be shadowbanned. You’re not going to be in front of those eyeballs. Art that aligns with the mainstream narrative, however, is rewarded.
Why did the CDC believe it was worthwhile to spend $2.4 million trying to convince college students to get vaccinated for a disease that poses little serious threat to most young, healthy individuals? Furthermore, why did the CDC and ACHA feel it was appropriate to peddle a potentially risky drug to young people as if it were a lifestyle brand?
