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Brownstone Institute

Listen to the Kids

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17 minute read

From the Brownstone Institute

BY  JENNIFER SEY

People often ask me why I still care about school closures and other covid restrictions that harmed a generation of children. “Schools are open now,” they say. “It’s enough already.”

No. It’s not. The impact to this generation of children continues. And so do many of the restrictions impacting young people.

It was just this week that New York City public schools lifted the ban on unvaccinated parents entering public school buildings.

This meant a parent who was unvaccinated could not attend a parent-teacher conference in person. Or watch their child play basketball. They could, however, attend a Knicks’ game at Madison Square Garden with 20,000 other basketball fans. This rule seemed designed specifically to punish children.

Colleges are some of the last places requiring vaccination — even boosters, in some instances, like at Fordham University. These young adults are least at risk from covid, most at risk from vaccine-induced myocarditis and are some of the last Americans required to be boosted. It makes no sense.

Rather than do my own rant about why I still care about the lasting harm done to children, I’d like to let the kids and parents speak for themselves.

The teens and parents cited below are all featured in a documentary film I’m making. I want their stories told. This all needs to be documented because the narrative is already shifting:

Yeah schools shouldn’t have been closed so long but how could we have known! It’s over now. Time to move on.”

Let’s declare an amnesty. We need to forgive the hard calls people needed to make without enough information. Good people did the best they could!

The open-schoolers may have been right but for the wrong reasons so they’re still terrible people. And besides it’s not a competition! No gloating! Let’s focus on the future!

But it’s not over. The kids are not alright. And there is insufficient focus on how to reintegrate them and help them recover. This article, from the New York Times on January 27, lays bare the harms done, the possible lifetime effects, and the lack of attention and care being paid to helping kids recover:

I will continue to advocate for them, to tell their stories, to try to get them the help they still need and deserve. And to ensure this never happens again.

It’s time we listened to the children and parents impacted.


Garrett “Bam” Morgan, Jr., high school student. Astoria Queens, NY:

“I was so upset. Why is it that someone who pays for school and has more money to throw around . . .why do they get to play football? And I don’t. What is the difference? Because we’re playing the same sport. It’s not like they’re playing something totally drastically different. It’s the same sport. We’re doing the same things, and they get to practice, they get to play. And I don’t, and for me it was just like, why? Why me? Why my teammates? Why is it that we don’t get to have fun? Why is it that we don’t get to play the sport that we love too? How am I going to get into a college if I don’t have a junior year of football?

“I was gaining weight. And I was getting in a place where I had to start thinking of alternatives to football, thinking of life without football. Then I would try and go out and play with my friends, towards 2021 when it started to become, okay, you can somewhat go out, just stay socially distanced. But by that time, the damage was done, right?”

Scarlett Nolan, high school student. Oakland, CA:

“I didn’t make any new friends. No one did. I mean, how could you, you’re just talking to literal black boxes on a computer.”

“I don’t wanna blame it all on school closures, but it’s been a really, really big thing for me. That’s changed my life so much. That’s not how it’s supposed to go in school. You’re supposed to have school. It’s supposed to be your life. School is supposed to be your life from kindergarten to senior year. And then you go to college if you want, but that’s supposed to be your life. That’s your education. You have your friends there, you find yourself there. You find how you wanna be when you grow up there. And without that, I lost who I was completely. Everything who I was. I wasn’t that person that worked to get straight A’s anymore. I didn’t care. I was just sad.”

Ellie O’Malley, Scarlett’s mom. Oakland, CA:

“She had finished her eighth grade. She had missed everything. She’d missed her graduation. She’d missed this trip to Washington. And then she started her new school [high school] on-line. [She was] very disengaged, never saw people’s faces, no one had the camera on. I mean it was school in like the thinnest most loose [sense] of the word. For the most part it was pretty dire and terrible. By January 2021, she really just no longer had the motivation to do it. She wasn’t getting out of bed. She was really depressed at that point.”

“A lot of it was just mental health, suicidal tendencies, self-harm. The first time Scarlett went to hospital, she kind of had a bit of a nervous breakdown. I’d never experienced that. She was screaming and clawing at herself. And we were like, what do we do? What do we do?”

Miki Sedivy, a mom who lost her teenaged daughter Hannah to an accidental drug overdose in 2021. Lakewood, CO:

“You’re taking children out of their natural environment of playing with each other, interacting socially and learning coping skills by interacting with other children. And when you take all of that away and all of a sudden these kids are in isolation, they mentally don’t know how to handle it. We can go [through] short times of isolation, but we’re talking a year and a half. [That’s] of a lot of isolation.”

Jennifer Dale. Her 11-year-old daughter has Down syndrome. Lake Oswego, OR. 

“The school closures were devastating for her. I don’t think I realized it at first. At first I thought it was safer. Lizzie, a child with Down syndrome, was probably more susceptible to a respiratory virus. She’s had more respiratory issues than her siblings. So at first I thought it was the right thing to do As time went on, I don’t think people realized how isolated she was. She doesn’t have a means of reaching out and saying Hey, how you doingI miss you. I wanna see you.

“What Lizzie really needs is to look at her peers and how are they zipping up their jacket, or how are they coming in in the morning and making a food selection for lunch. That peer interaction and that peer role modeling is some of the best learning that my daughter can experience. But that role modeling is gone. When you’re online she doesn’t get to see what the other kids are doing. She wasn’t out seeing people. Nobody knew that she was struggling. It was all in our house. It was impossible for a young person with cognitive delays to understand why, why was the world suddenly closed? Why suddenly could I not see my friends? Why am I only seeing them on a screen and how do I interact?”

Am’Brianna Daniels, high school student. San Francisco, CA. 

“As time moved on, like later in the year, I started to realize I really wanted to be back in school. I was 24/7 [on Zoom] and I think that’s what took a toll on me. . . I actually stayed doing Zoom in my living room that way I wasn’t tempted to fall asleep or anything. This did not help. I still did fall asleep sometimes.”

“I had like very little motivation to actually get up, get on Zoom and attend class. And then I think coming up on the year anniversary of the initial lockdown and then the lack of social interaction is kind of what took a toll on my mental health since I am such a social person. And so it really got to a point where I was just not going to class.”

“And it got really bad to the point where I was either over-eating or just not eating very much, and I was kind of dehydrated during my depressive moods. And eventually I did get in contact with the therapist. It helped a little bit, but not to the extent that I would have hoped.

Nelson Ropati, high school student. San Francisco, CA. 

“I just didn’t like staring at a screen for an hour for class. I just couldn’t do it. I would fall asleep or just lose focus easily.”

“It wasn’t really mandatory to go to class. So I ain’t gonna lie. I didn’t really go to class the rest of my junior year when covid hit and they kind of just passed everyone.”

Lorna Ropati, Nelson’s mom. San Francisco, CA. 

“I felt bad for him because then that’s when he started doing nothing else, but just like eating. I said you’re not hungry. It’s just a habit. Don’t go to the fridge. He just mainly stayed home and did whatever he could through his on-line courses and just stayed home. I think he didn’t go out of the house at one point for six months. He didn’t go nowhere. He never even stepped out of the house. So that was not good. I said, you need to get out, you need to stop being in this little shell and bubble that you’re in. It’s okay. You can go out.”

Jim Kuczo, lost his son Kevin to suicide in 2021. Fairfield, CT. 

“Well we were very concerned because of the grades — that was the tip off. But again, it was hard because you can’t go out with your friends. We were concerned. We asked the guidance counselor and the therapist, is he suicidal? They said no.”

“You cannot treat kids like prisoners and expect them to be okay. I think that we, our leaders, put most of the burden on children.”

“I went through lots of guilt — what did I do to cause my son to kill himself.”

Kristen Kuczo, Kevin’s mom. Fairfield, CT. 

“He [Kevin] wound up not playing football and then we kind of just started noticing he just was doing less and less. His grades were starting to drop. Really the biggest red flag for me was the grades dropping.”

“The day after he took his life, I was supposed to be having a meeting with the guidance counselors and we were looking into getting him a 504, which would allow him extra time to do things and possibly on exams. We were pursuing that as a possibility to try to help support him in the school setting. Because he had spoken to us about having trouble focusing and feeling like he just couldn’t do it.”

“All these doctors, they weren’t taking anybody. They weren’t taking patients because they were full. They didn’t have any space to take on new clients. It was shocking. So I didn’t have an appointment with a psychiatrist until about a week and a half after Kevin passed.”


I’ll leave you with a few words from Garrett Morgan, Jr. He’s struggling to get his life back on track. To get his grades back up. To lose the 80 pounds he gained. To get back in shape. To play football again. To get that college scholarship.

He’s a fighter. And I have confidence he’ll succeed. But he won’t forget what he and his peers lost, what was taken from them, and how much tougher his road ahead is because of it.

“This is something that my generation will not forget. This is also something that my generation will not forgive. The memories that we have lost, the experiences that we have lost, the skills that we have lost because of covid. And now we have to regain that and go out into the world. It is going to be something that will define us.”

Reposted from the author’s Substack

Author

Jennifer Sey is filmmaker, former corporate executive, and author of Levi’s Unbuttoned.

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Brownstone Institute

First Amendment Blues

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By Philip DaviesPhilip Davies 

You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU.

I’m envious. The US has something the UK doesn’t have, namely a First Amendment. Yes I know there are those who wish the US didn’t have it either, including, I understand, John Kerry and that woman who still thinks she beat Trump the first time around. Kerry kind of wishes that the First Amendment wasn’t quite so obstructive to his plans. But from where I stand, you should be thankful for it.

Not only does the UK not have a First Amendment, it doesn’t have a constitution either, and that makes for worrying times right now. Free speech has little currency with Gen Z and the way it looks, even less with the new UK Labour government. Even Elon Musk, who takes a surprising interest in our little country, has recently declared the UK a police state.

It’s not surprising. Take for instance the case of Alison Pearson, who had the police knocking on her door this Remembrance Sunday. They had come to warn her they were investigating a tweet she had posted a whole year ago which someone had complained about. They were investigating whether it constituted a Non-Crime Hate Incident or NCHI. Yes, you heard me right, a ‘non-crime’ hate incident and no, this is not something out of Orwell, it’s straight out of the College of Policing’s playbook.

If you haven’t heard of them, you can thank your First Amendment. In the UK you can get a police record for something you posted on X that someone else didn’t like and you haven’t even committed a crime. NCHIs are a way they have of getting around the law in the same way John Kerry would like to get around the First Amendment, except it’s real where I live.

Alison Pearson is a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, but that doesn’t mean she can write what she likes. When she asked the police what the tweet was which was objected to, she was told they couldn’t tell her that. When she asked who the complainant was, they said they couldn’t tell her that either. They added, that she shouldn’t call them a complainant, they were officially the victim. That’s what due process is like when you don’t have a First Amendment or a constitution. Victims of NCHI in the UK are decided without a trial or a defense. They asked, very politely, if Pearson would like to come voluntarily to the police station for a friendly interview. If she didn’t want to come voluntarily, they would put her on a wanted list and she would eventually be arrested. Nice choice.

It’s true that there has been a public ruckus over this particular case, but the police are unapologetic and have doubled down. Stung into action by unwanted publicity, they are now saying they have raised the matter from an NCHI to an actual crime investigation. Which means they think she can be arrested and put in prison for expressing her opinion on X. And of course they are right. In the UK that’s where we are right now. Pearson tried to point out the irony of two police officers turning up on her door to complain about her free speech on Remembrance Day of all days, when we recall the thousands who died to keep this a free country, but irony is lost on those who have no memory of what totalitarianism means.

The way things are looking I would say things can only get worse. The new Labour government has made it clear that it wants to beef up the reporting of NCHIs and make them an effective tool for clamping down on hurtful speech. You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU. Germany in particular is keen to remove all misinformation from the internet, I understand.

Whenever I see the word ‘misinformation’ these days I automatically translate it in my head to what it really means, which is ‘dissent.’ Western countries, former champions of free speech, the bedrock of liberty and individual choice, en masse it seems, now want to outlaw dissent. What is coordinating this attack on free expression, I don’t know, but it’s real and it’s upon us. We are slowly being intellectually suffocated into not expressing any opinion that others might find objectionable or that might contradict what the government said. If you had told me that would happen in my lifetime, I would have called you a liar.

I live in the UK, the home of the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta, and the mother of parliamentary democracy. I was proud that we produced men like John Milton, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Paine, that we understood the importance of the Areopagitica, the Rights of Man, and incorporated On Liberty into our social thinking. But those days seem long gone when police knock on your door to arrest you for an X post.

So I’m glad someone somewhere has a First Amendment even if we don’t. It may be your last defense in that republic of yours, if you can keep it.

Author

Philip Davies

Philip Davies is Visiting Fellow at Bournemouth University, UK. He gained a PhD in Quantum Mechanics at the University of London and has been an academic for over 30 years teaching Masters students how to think for themselves. He is now retired and has the luxury of thinking for himself. He fills in his spare time with a small YouTube channel where he interviews amazing academics and indulges in writing books and articles.

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Brownstone Institute

The Most Devastating Report So Far

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By Jay BhattacharyaJayanta Bhattacharya 

The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.

HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.

The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.

Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.

The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.

The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.

President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?

In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.

During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.

In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.

In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.

Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.

HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.

When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.

In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.

The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.

In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?

The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.

The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.

I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.

In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.

With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.

The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.

Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.

You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.

Author

Jay Bhattacharya

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a physician, epidemiologist and health economist. He is Professor at Stanford Medical School, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a Faculty Member at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute, and a Fellow at the Academy of Science and Freedom. His research focuses on the economics of health care around the world with a particular emphasis on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. Co-Author of the Great Barrington Declaration.

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