For nearly a year, the World Health Organization (WHO), the Imperial College, the CDC, Anthony Fauci, the mainstream media, and most of our world leaders have been relentlessly amplifying the doomsday devastation messaging that has sound-tracked the international response to COVID-19. Given the grave seriousness, even the hysteria with which we have addressed the spread of the SARS CoV2 virus, is it any wonder frontline professionals, such as teachers, have been reluctant to return to the classrooms where they might fall prey to the 2021 version of the bubonic plague?
Jerry Garcia sang: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” He could have been writing presciently about the last year of international COVID catastrophe and our wayward response to it. Remember the two-week closures of schools and businesses and mandated quarantines in March of 2020 undertaken to “flatten the curve”? Smash cut to nearly a year later after political rancor has divided us and the serial reversals on COVID policy by Anthony Fauci, the WHO, and the CDC have flummoxed us. Discussions of opening up America and getting children back to in-person learning are only now beginning to happen.
The Lockdown Failure
A whole year gone – and the first global lockdown of the healthy in the world’s history looks to be an abject and tragic failure that was far more impactful than the virus it sought to mitigate. Internationally, approximately 0.4% of those infected with SARS CoV2 die from it, while the number is 0.26% in America. These numbers are so far below the Imperial College estimates that functioned as the green light to impose quarantines internationally that they effectively constitute scientific malpractice. Meanwhile, the World Bank now estimates that as many as 150 million people will be forced into extreme poverty this year by COVID-19 – or more accurately, by the universal lockdowns and economic devastation occasioned by our fatally flawed international response.
One of the most calamitous impacts – and one for which no real metric yet exists – is the damage done to a generation of children barred from in-person learning for a year. Fractionally speaking, that one year is a massive piece of the pie on a child’s lifetime chart – to wit: it’s one-fifth of a Kindergarteners’ entire existence and one-tenth of a 4th grader’s. Pretty significant. But we won’t know how consequential the effects have been on children for a long time – maybe even years.
We have been relentlessly conditioned by the media, our leaders, and the “experts” to fear a virus the CDC asserts has a 99.74% recovery rate in America. That is an average. CDC tells us that 99.997% survive infection between ages 0-19. It is a 99.98% recovery rate for ages 20-49, 99.5% for ages 50-69, and 94.6% for those over 70.
Not many people know these numbers – and that was perhaps by design. The fear instilled in us has allowed for major pivots toward increased domestic and international power. The “Great Reset,” as encouraged by leaders as various as Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, and the Pope, would confer massive economic and cultural power on a ruling elite. These figures of influence and many more surely must have the aphorism “never let a crisis go to waste” henna-tattooed over their hearts as they are all seeking to make hay while the rain falls.
Reopening Schools – Why Now But Not Last Year?
But even though schools are beginning to open again – the Chicago Teachers’ Union just struck a deal to return this week – there is still some understandable reluctance on the part of many teachers to get back to in-person learning. For one, the new urge to open schools seems suspiciously arbitrary. Are the COVID infection rates less now than they were back in May when former President Trump, the AAP (American Association of Pediatrics), and then-Education Secretary Betsy Devos were calling for schools to open? The simple answer is no – they are higher than back in the Spring and Summer of 2020. So why now, teachers have a right to ask. Why the big push to open schools again if the infection rates are higher than last year?
The answer to that may well be that a new administration has taken the reins of power and – alongside its enablers in the mainstream media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the Democratic Party – want to change the narrative from one of perpetual panic to one of getting back to “normal,” whatever that means in 2021.
With that goal in mind, the Biden administration got a huge assist from the chronically corrupted World Health Organization (WHO), which in December quietly changed its PCR testing guidelines. That change reflects the fact that in some cases, as many as 90% of tests administered yielded false positives driving the “case-demic” through the roof before the November election.
Just hours after Biden was inaugurated, the WHO trumpeted its new cycle threshold protocols for the PCR tests, which has magically resulted in weeks of steadily falling cases. This is akin to selling someone a car without wheels and then marveling at how superb a vehicle it is and how many places you can travel to after you’ve put them back on.
So, given the double-messaging of Anthony Fauci, the reversals of the WHO and the CDC, and the bold mendacity of demanding schools open now when the number of cases is still much higher than when the last administration was urging re-openings, are teachers crazy, paranoid, selfish, or lazy not to want to jump back in?
Teachers have been indoctrinated to fear a virus for which there are no known examples of student-to-teacher transmission. Maybe these educators are on to something. Perhaps their fear is well-warranted – but misplaced. Is this fear, for which teachers have been derided as self-serving hypochondriacs, not because of the virus – but because of the vaccine meant to eradicate it?
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Read more from author Pennel Bird.
