It’s another Christmas season, and the very evil elf, Dr. Tony Fauci, is threatening everyone with coal in their stocking if they don’t follow in lockstep with his Christmas advice. Even our elfin friend knows that by this time in the pandemic that he’ll be canceled from public view if he tells folks not to enjoy Christmas. So instead, he’s laundry-listing the things folks are supposed to do to allow any of their friends into their home. Clearly, it’s time to put that elf on the shelf back into his box in the basement. He’s made enough money for Pfizer this year.
In other COVID-19 news, we’re still masking kids, whose threat from COVID-19 is essentially nonexistent. This was true before the COVID-19 vaccine, but now with the availability of the vaccine, it’s even lower. How much lower we can’t know, since the kid’s vaccine is still under an Emergency Use Authorization, or EUA, obtained under the most specious of circumstances. They don’t have enough data, which caused one of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioners, upon voting for the EUA, to say “we’ll run the experiment and find out.” This is on your kids, folks, and it’s not the same as the adult situation, where vaccines have dramatically reduced mortality.
Elsewhere in our crazy COVID-19 paranoia land, we have Press Secretary Jennifer “Psycho” Psaki telling us about appropriate child care in schools. And what might that be? She’ll be happy to tell you about her 3-year-old who sits isolated outside for snacks and lunch, and is perfectly happy to be masked up indoors. This is for a virus that essentially has no risk for their well-being at all. But sitting alone on a paint bucket in the cold? I have to hope that if this happened at Christmas dinner locally, someone would call Child Protective Services. These people inflicting this crazy garbage on us, besides being dedicated sadists, have obviously lost their ever-loving minds.
Locally, we have schools in Pullman (I don’t have a contact in the Moscow schools) where students follow at least a modified version of crazy. Masks don’t work, and they’re a torment to children in general, preventing learning as well as emotional connection. But that connection is something that our school boards have decided is really not a necessary component of a student’s learning. So kids eat in little pods, and outside, during recess, there is a crazy quilt of rules about who has to wear a mask, and who doesn’t. From my understanding, students who can maintain a 6-foot distance from each other don’t, and those who can’t, do. Those who break the rules are sentenced up against the wall for the remainder of recess for disobedience.
How any of this stops COVID-19, or utilizes either science or compassion, is utterly beyond me. And I’ll bet it’s beyond the comprehension of most of the staff and faculty of our schools. Even if COVID-19 was like Ebola, there are no studies showing that any of this does anything regarding the virus. In fact, there is plenty of work, demonstrated by football game after football game, that none of this makes any difference at all.
When is it going to stop? We even have vaccines for kids now, and it’s not enough for the Branch COVIDians. There is no off-ramp for ending the ineffective nonpharmaceutical interventions, or NPIs, that the powers-that-be desire, because it breaks kids down and prepares them for a future at the bottom of the economic stack. At the same time all this is going on, the selfsame Centers for Disease Control and prevention issued last week a report on the crisis in children’s mental health. Coincidence? Not likely. Gaslight young people enough, and it disorients them in their ability to make sense of their world.
It’s time for folks to take a stand and give our kids a real Christmas present. Stop the nonsense NPIs. These are your kids, folks. Let your school board and the governor know how you feel.
Pezeshki is a professor in mechanical and materialsengineering at Washington State University.