Yet, throughout this pandemic, notice how many global health scholars were totally silent on lockdowns. How many global health researchers said nothing as India sacrificed the future of a generation with school closures? How many US based disparity researchers or early childhood advocates were silent on school closure? I believe most were quiet!
Consider that the powers and plans to do this still exist. They can do it again. Mardi Gras can be canceled again. You can be locked in your home. Your church, business, gym, and favorite watering hole can be closed. They have promised as much. This is what needs to change.
Some degree of levity about the comedic qualities of the last two years is merited but it needs to be complemented by a serious commitment toward radical reform. We need a new way to think about how a good society can develop freely even in the presence of infectious disease. Freedom needs to be nonnegotiable.
Overreaching public health officials and politicians—and the journalists-in-name-only who served as their mindless, unquestioning megaphones—have fully earned our withering condemnation. Indeed, holding them accountable is essential to sparing ourselves and future generations from repeating this dystopian chapter of human history.
The CDC nowhere admits this much less apologizes for it. Two years in, the CDC seems to have rediscovered the traditional practice of public health, and has justified this new wisdom based on changed conditions, while never even bothering to claim that its previous measures and guidelines achieved anything along the way.
The CDC Discovers Actual Public Health, Just in Time Read More
Post Covid, the group that needs to face the strongest restrictions is public health itself. We must remove the power we have granted public health, which has often been misused.
Experts in vision think online schooling during lockdown may well be increasing the speed of myopic eye growth. A host of possible sequelae from excess myopia include things like increased risk of glaucoma, macular degeneration and retinal detachment.
Lockdowns Might Have Contributed to Myopia In Children Read More
As I cleared out my desk, I came across infographics on the importance of babies seeing faces, the dangers of too much screen time, and notes from trainings that described the detrimental effects of social isolation. These were relics of a time when the well-being of children was the singular focus of my work, but that era in public health seemed to have passed.
Norway is the future and the rest of the world needs to get on board and ride this enlightened, public health cluetrain into the next chapter. Invite the world back into your country. Open the borders to commerce and trade. Bring back adventure and discovery for everyone.
That such an obvious and settled point of science became taboo for a time is truly a scandal for the ages. Now we know that it was a deliberate decision. Why? And why are we only now hearing about it, long after knowing this truth might have saved so much destruction?
Masks are actually part of a very big deal for children, because they interfere with every aspect of normal social functioning, and raising an entire generation of kids to believe that hiding their faces is normal, and that it plus “testing” completes their civic duty toward our collective public health.
Stay-at-home orders in real life become a class-protection scheme to keep high-end laptop professionals shielded from the virus while imposing the burden of exposure on people who have no option but to be out and about. In other words, the working classes are effectively forced to bear the burden of herd immunity, while the rich and financially secure stay safe and wait for the pandemic to pass.
