Maybe the Covid Generation isn’t as hopeless as I assumed:
Look at them squirm in the back. They’re being dismantled by a 17 year old. And I’ll bet this girl isn’t alone in feeling the way she does about all the Covid-2019 restrictions.
Could the lockdowns and mandates and insanity be the thing that finally breaks the power of the public schools?
It’s really the mask mandates on kids, above all, that stand out to me as uniquely cruel. Masks are so awful, and these poor kids have to wear then all day long. It’s honestly evil. The kids themselves are not at any real risk; it’s the terrified and brainwashed (and probably a little power-hungry and sadistic) teachers who want the kids in masks.
It’s not just in schools, either. Right around Christmas, I was getting on a plane and there was a family in front of me–just a mother and at least 3-4 young kids, probably all under the age of 10, but I don’t really remember. There was one little girl, couldn’t have been more than 5 years old, who wasn’t wearing a mask in the airport. When the family got up to the gate to board the plane, this cunt airline worker has to start bossing the mom around, “UM, WHERE IS HER MASK? She needs to be wearing a mask. I cannot let her on the plane without a mask. THIS IS NOT A NEW RULE PEOPLE, YOU KNOW YOUR KIDS HAVE TO BE MASKED.”
So the mom–while holding another kid–starts trying explain to her young daughter that she has to wear a mask on the plane. The little girl wasn’t having it. She didn’t want to, so she started crying. It was all happening right in front of me and I felt very bad for the family. This woman from the airline was being such a nasty cunt about it, and this little girl had no idea why she was in trouble and why she had to wear a mask. Plus the mom had other kids to worry about. The other kids were masked, but the little girl wasn’t. I get it; your kids are all different in their own ways. Some will happily wear the mask if that’s what mommy says, others are more rebellious and don’t want to. Kids are just different, they don’t all act the exact same and they shouldn’t be expected to understand that they have to follow Adult Rules.
Again, this little girl was no older than 4-5. Little kids don’t have to follow rules in public. I mean think about it: until you go to school, the only rules you have to follow are your parents’ rules. But now we have strangers yelling at little kids telling them to MASK UP. It’s fucked up. It shouldn’t be happening, but it is.
The reason is because people are Just Following Orders, no matter how irrational, draconian and cruel. Some of these people, though, seem to actually relish and enjoy screaming at tiny young children. That’s the worst part of it all–and apparently it’s unique to America as well.
This article in Tablet by Vinay Prasad called “The Cult of Masked Schoolchildren” goes into the matter, proclaiming at the beginning that “history will not look kindly on our evidence-free decision to make kids suffer most”:
The United States is uniquely aggressive in masking young kids. Contrary to scientific evidence, the Centers for Disease Control and the American Academy of Pediatrics advise that children as young as 2 should wear masks. Europe has always been more relaxed on this issue, and the World Health Organization advises against masks for kids under 6 and only selectively for kids under 11.
Why aren’t we Trusting The Experts™ in the US?
Data from Spain on masking kids is sobering. The figure below shows the R value—a measure of how fast the virus spreads—by age. Spain mandated masks at a specific age cutoff. If masks have a visible effect, we should see a step down in the graph at the age kids start to wear them (i.e., the spread should drop at the age masking begins). But as you can see, there is only a slow, deliberate, upward trend with no steps down. Based on the evidence only, it would be impossible to guess which age groups are wearing masks and which are not.
This simply means that masking was not associated with a large effect in slowing spread. (If you’re curious, kids started to wear masks in this study at age 6.)
You can’t see any effect at all. Masking kids is having no effect on the r0 of Covid-19. It’s pure cruelty and power-tripping at worst, cowardice at the very best.
Now let’s consider N95 or equivalent masks that are designed to filter a high percentage of particles. To achieve this goal, N95 masks require a snug fit and validation. Notably, there are no approved N95s for kids because these masks have not been subject to validation for young people. All masks sold with this moniker are merely “N95-style” masks thought to be equivalent, possibly. Berkeley and other school districts have mandated them anyway, even though no study suggests the policy can slow the spread of COVID.
Brilliant.
What is the goal of masking policy? Does it at least help to “slow” the spread? Pre-vaccine, it made sense to try to delay infection until all those who wished could be vaccinated, the latter being an intervention that does have a demonstrable effect on rates of serious disease and death. While cloth-masking does little if anything to delay infection, universal N95-masking might have indeed been helpful. But does this goal still make sense after vaccines and omicron?
Omicron has shown it is able to infect even vaccinated people relatively easily (even though, yes, vaccines do still appear to protect from severe disease). The fact that omicron is widely spread by vaccinated people, coupled with its rapid rate of spread, means that sooner rather than later we will all be infected—a conclusion shared earlier this month by Anthony Fauci. But if infection is inevitable for everyone, then it no longer makes sense to wear a mask. Even the most effective mask can’t avert infection; it can only delay it while causing inconvenience, discomfort, and difficulty speaking, all of which are detrimental to the educational and emotional well-being of schoolchildren.
It is simply irrational. People know deep down they’re going to get omicron sooner or later, but they frantically Mask Up™ and scream at children to wear masks because they irrationally believe they might somehow avoid omicron if they’re really diligent about masking.
Tell me something: does it make a whole lot of sense for people who are already wearing masks to demand others wear masks?
You can’t really be confident in the effectiveness of your mask if you’re demanding other people wear masks, right?
Put another way, while we don’t know whether Berkeley’s school masking policy will in fact slow the spread, we do know it’s a bad policy regardless: If it works, it merely delays an inevitable brush with COVID, and is therefore unnecessary; if it doesn’t work (and the impossibility of children maintaining a proper fit and seal for hours on end suggests it can’t), it is simply a piece of public health theater whose side-effects are likely to be severe, and is therefore unnecessary.
The problem is that this is a rational and logical argument, but these Mask Freaks are impervious to reason and logic. They are making fear and panic-driven decisions, and no amount of logic will get through to them. They are gripped by hysteria.
Should kids and parents be afraid of COVID? Parents of kids with immunosuppression and other severe medical problems should seek the guidance and advice of their pediatrician in order to decide what is best for their child. But the majority of parents of healthy kids should put their fears of COVID into perspective. A (pre-vaccine!) analysis from Germany shows that if a child is infected with COVID—with or without preexisting conditions—there is an 8 in 100,000 chance of going to the intensive care unit. According to the same study, the risk of death is 3 in 1 million, with no deaths reported in the over-5 age group. These risks are astonishingly low.
BUT THERE’S STILL A RISK!!!!
Again, we’re dealing in facts here, but the Mask Freaks are dealing in emotion and hysteria. They have no perspective. As long as there’s any sort of risk at all from Covid-19, no matter how remote, they are at DEFCON-1.
Car accidents are the leading cause of death among children and adolescents–kids are way more likely die in car accidents than they are from Covid-19. But you don’t see these nutcases demanding we ban kids from riding in cars. Obviously not. That would be ridiculous.
We simply accept that there is an inevitable degree of risk that comes with being in a moving vehicle. We know the risks of being in a car, while not non-existent, are still remote, and that it would simply be too much of an inconvenience to avoid driving altogether even though there is admittedly some risk of death assumed every time you get in a car. We weigh the risks and the rewards.
But Covid-19 has broken a lot of people’s brains. To a lot of people out there, as long as the risk of dying of Covid-19 is above 0%, then no rule or restriction is too inconvenient for them. There is no tradeoff they will not make as long as COVID IS STILL OUT THERE.
Furthermore, there is no rule or restriction they won’t impose on you, and me and everyone else in the country if it makes them feel safer. It is incredibly selfish behavior.
When it comes to the downsides of masking kids, I want to be clear that no prior study truly informs the moment: In all of human history we have never masked so many children for so many hours a day for so many years. As such, we have very little data from which to draw lessons. We simply do not know the long-term impacts of this evidence-free intervention.
Yet the preliminary evidence that we do have is illuminating. Fifty-nine percent of U.K. teachers in April 2021 stated that asking pupils to wear masks made understanding them a “lot more difficult.” We know that when someone conceals their lips it’s harder to comprehend what they’re saying. This effect is of course more pronounced among children with hearing and learning disabilities. For this reason, a recent “evidence summary” from the U.K. Department of Education concluded, “Government guidance continues to be that children aged under 11 years old should be exempt from requirements to wear face coverings in all settings including education.”
This is how a rational society operates. But America is apparently uniquely irrational.
Now the article gets to the real heart of the matter: selfishness of idiotic and irrational adults.
One justification I often hear for masking kids is some variation of, “My kids are masked and they’re doing just fine.” I hear and see this frequently from professional colleagues—people with doctorate-level training and considerable financial resources to help support the children in question. But is the same true for a child whose mother works long hours and spends prolonged time in day care? Do all kids get the same stimulation outside of school to compensate for the pandemic-era deprivations we subject them to? The answer to these questions is likely no. While the assertion is often made that masking kids is a form of unselfish behavior—and that those who oppose it are the real selfish ones because they put others at risk—the data appears to support the opposite conclusion.
Because U.S. masking policies are largely forms of virtue-signaling and public health performance, it’s not surprising that they are often blatantly self-contradictory and absurd. Recall that the CDC and AAP have both advised masks for kids ages 2 to 5, in contrast to WHO guidelines. To get a sense of this policy in practice, think of the day care centers that made toddlers wear cloth masks except during nap time, when they sleep side-by-side with their peers in the same room. Similarly, schools that mandate masks have little choice but to lift those requirements at lunchtime.
None of it makes any sense at all. But we are dealing with irrational and idiotic adults who don’t understand the concept of risk/reward, and who view children as dangerous “superspreaders.”
Masking is now little more than an appealing delusion. It arms us with a visible symbol that communicates our commitment to minimizing the pandemic’s damage. It makes some of us feel empowered by giving us something “we can do” in the face of a largely invisible threat. To a certain extent, this is understandable. But most of the masks worn by most kids for most of the pandemic have likely done nothing to change the velocity or trajectory of the virus. The loss to children remains difficult to capture in hard data, but will likely become clear in the years to come.
Less forgivable is the decision we’ve made as a society to shift the anxieties of adults onto the youngest members of society, who count on us to defend their interests before our own. It is thanks to the nature of this particular virus, rather than the foresight of American institutions or adults, that COVID has been relatively impotent against children. The majority of kids who have been infected have recovered without sequelae. And yet we continue to impose the most harmful and onerous restrictions on the youngest among us. While we purportedly do it to protect other age groups, empirical analysis suggests, for instance, that school closures in a given community have done nothing to slow the spread among the elderly in the same community.
When the history books are written, we will not look wise or kind for insisting that kids and toddlers wear masks for hours on end, year after year, without ever testing this policy with controlled trials. We will look ignorant, cruel, fearful, and cowardly. We might even look worse than our primitive ancestors who, when faced with great plagues, engaged in all sorts of bizarre, superstitious behavior—but which rarely included making kids suffer most.
It’s unconscionable. Irrational and terrified adults are literally torturing young children in order to feel safer (and also to virtue signal). None of it is based on science at all.
Of all the imagery that will remain from this era of Covid-19, probably the most revealing and emblematic of the mass hysteria and irrationality will be the images of people in masks.
People working out in masks has always struck me as the most idiotic thing I’ve seen during Covid:
I still cannot get over being at the gym and wearing a mask. It has felt wrong and stupid since day one, and I’ll never change my mind. There is nothing about it that makes sense, and it has always struck me as Peak Covid Idiocy.
But then I saw the pictures of people wearing masks while playing BASKETBALL:
Are you kidding me? Does any part of this make sense at all?
Future generations are going to look back at these images and think we were truly the dumbest society of all time.
But while these images reflect idiocy, the images of kindergartners sitting outside, eating lunch while socially distanced from one another goes beyond just idiocy. It’s cruelty bordering on psychological abuse:
Kids trust adults to look out for their best interests. They are inherently trusting that adults–parents, teachers, etc.–are always looking out for them, and protecting them.
They figure that if the Adults are making them wear masks all day at school, and making them sit alone while eating lunch, then it must be for their own good.
Not the case, sadly.
None of this is being done to protect the children.
It is all in fact being done at the children’s expense in order to make the adults feel safer, despite there being no empirical evidence at all that it is actually making adults safer.
I don’t know how the Covid Generation of kids is going to turn out. They could turn into a generation of neurotic, traumatized, emotionally fragile hypochondriacs. (Admittedly, if this is this case, they wouldn’t be much different from the Millennials and Gen-Z.)
But they could also come to harbor a deep resentment toward the adults who have made the last 2 years miserable for them. They could become radically anti-authority and distrusting of the system, and vow to get revenge on the people that did this to them.
Don’t assume this is a good thing, and that these kids are all going to be Based and Redpilled and Republican. The trauma they’ve endured–along with the disruption to their emotional, social and educational development–could turn them into the most mentally-ill, antisocial and psychotic generation we’ve ever seen.
I don’t think this is going to happen. Kids, as they say, are resilient. But don’t underestimate the impact of childhood trauma. It sticks with people for a long time–often for life. If you really sit there and meditate about why you are the way you are, you can probably link your tendencies and emotional biases back to something that happened to you when you were younger.
What our society has done to these poor kids these past 2 years may well stick with them and traumatize them for the rest of their lives. It’s entirely possible. It’s basically been one big social experiment, and the kids have been the guinea pigs. It’s incredibly fucked up.
Only time will tell how the Covid Generation turns out. But my gut feeling tells me they’re not going to look back on this era with gratitude towards the people that made them wear masks for 8 hours a day.