Brownstone Institute
The Loneliest Generation
From the Brownstone Institute
By all accounts, Americans are lonelier, more anxious, more depressed and more suicidal than ever. The Pew Research Center reports that at least 40 percent of adults faced high levels of psychological distress during covid. Alarmingly, young people are leading this trend, as they do with most trends; though with this one, their “trendiness” is a cause for serious concern.
- The suicide rate in the United States is the highest of all wealthy nations. One in 5 young women and 1 in 10 young men experience major clinical depression before age 25.
- Suicide rates among children 10 and older are the second leading cause of death among 10-24-year-olds, behind unintentional injuries and accidents.
- Close to 10 percent of kids 13-17 years-old have received an ADHD diagnosis and over 60 percent of those kids have been placed on medication. And 60 percent of them have been diagnosed with a second emotional or behavioral disorder. Thirty percent of those diagnosed with ADHD were also diagnosed with anxiety.
- Among teen girls who report suicidal thoughts, 6 percent of them traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram. What’s worse is, Instagram — owned by Facebook parent company, Meta — knew their platform was adversely impacting teen girls and did nothing to stop it, presumably because that would interfere with the ever-increasing screen time for these young girls. In 2019, one Meta internal company slide in a presentation read: “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.” But more screen time = more data to mine = more profits for social media companies.
Of note, these alarming numbers are all likely underestimates vs the current state of affairs, as they are all from BEFORE isolating covid policies took hold.
In March 2020 our kids were thrust onto screens for hours and hours each day, and were left with their only means of “socialization” to be on-line or “virtual.” They were forced to Zoom and DM and Twitch and TikTok all day every day, if they didn’t just give up altogether and hole up in their rooms under the covers, with absolutely zero interaction at all.
If young people have little hope for the future, feel isolated, disconnected and as if their very existence doesn’t matter, what hope do we have for the future as a society? And when kids are deemed to be inessential, their schooling and activities at the bottom of the list of our societal priorities, how else are they going to feel but inessential?
Recently, Democratic Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy wrote a piece for The Bulwark called “The Politics of Loneliness.” He rightly acknowledged that increased technology and social media usage have contributed to ever-accelerating social isolation which has led, in turn, to more anxiety and depression. He cites “the pandemic” as having accelerated this trend, which is the first point I’d challenge. It was pandemic policy not the virus itself that accelerated the isolation, loss of connection and a diminished sense of community.
While in the beginning of the pandemic, almost all governors shut down schools, places of worship and businesses, it was Democratic leaders who persisted in keeping them closed, or heavily restricted for over two years. I place the blame squarely with them. And so my patience with Senator Murphy showing up to pretend he has the answer is pretty much non-existent.
The ability to gather, celebrate, mourn, congregate and protest was taken away from the citizens of these left-leaning locales. There were no weddings, graduations, proms, holiday celebrations, funerals, AA meetings or in-person work with water cooler conversations. And then, we were lonely. And Democratic political leaders had the gall to weaponize our loneliness against us. We were demonized and told we were selfish to even want these things. If we craved in-person connection, we were labeled murderers and grandma-killers, creating shame for desiring connection at all. We were vilified for being HUMAN.
The “solution” they sold us: stop being so self-centered; go online more (Zoom cocktail hour anyone?); and drug yourself and your kids (if Zoom alone isn’t cutting it.)
And kids suffered from the most egregious restrictions and harms. Outdoor playgrounds were closed in San Francisco for more than 8 months. Playgrounds! Basketball hoops were removed from backboards and skate ramps were filled with sand, but golfers were permitted to hit the links. San Francisco is the city with the fewest children per capita in America. Gee, I wonder why?
Is it any surprise that young people became even more depressed and despondent during lockdowns? What is a life but the sum of life markers, milestones and everyday activities? When a child has no idea when the forced isolation will end — when relief might be granted from these authoritarian dictates — how do they cobble together a life with any semblance of hope for a meaningful non-virtual existence?
Closed schools shut children off from any sense of community. As Ellie O’Malley, a mom in Oakland whose daughter Scarlett has suffered grievous mental health impacts from the public school closures, said in an interview for a documentary film I am making:
“Schools are more than the sum of their parts and more than education. They’re more than just this teacher to student knowledge. They’re about community. They’re about the ups and downs of life and how you deal with them and having practice dealing with them in a safe setting where you might have a crisis, but it’s okay because a teacher reassures you or a friend and you have this web of community around you. And without that, when that disappeared for kids, there was just a void.”
Ellie’s daughter, Scarlett Nolan, who spent months hospitalized for her emotional and mental distress, reinforced this when she explained what school closures were like for her:
”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. That’s your education. You have your friends there, you find yourself there. You find how you want to be when you grow up there. And without that, I lost completely who I was. Everything who I was. I wasn’t that person that worked to get straight A’s anymore. I didn’t care…It’s not real life. Why should I care?”
Jim Kuczo of Fairfield, Connecticut lost his son to suicide in 2021. He told me:
”You cannot treat kids like prisoners and expect them to be okay. I think that our leaders put most of the burden on children.”
San Francisco high school graduate, Am’Brianna Daniels, reiterated these same themes:
”I had 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 [March 2021] 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 here’s where I really take issue with Senator Murphy’s recommendation: he claims that there is a role for government policy to reverse this troubling trend.
It’s a case of the arsonists wanting to be given the job of putting out the fire that they themselves started!
No thank you. Stay out of our lives and our kids’ lives. You’ve done enough damage.
Government actions started us on this trajectory well before covid and lockdowns. Cozy relationships with Big Tech and Big Pharma led to highly addictive social media practices for the purpose of data harvesting, censorship on social media, over-prescribed drugs for our children — putting them on a path to a lifetime of medicalization, and unsafe use of prescription drugs overall (remember, it was the FDA who granted Purdue Pharma the “non-addictive” label for OxyContin).
The collusion between government and Big Pharma and Big Tech got us into this situation. At every step, whether it was a disregard for minors’ well-being (TikTok, Instagram) or over-regulation in the form of vaccine mandates and forced Zoom school, the government has colluded and supported Tech and Pharma to increase the profits of these companies. And put our kids last.
Forgive me if I don’t want your help “fixing” the thing you broke.
Leave us alone. No more interventions. When we let you in, you ruin it. We’ll take the reins from here, thanks.
Moms and dads — put down your phones, go for a walk, play with your kids, talk to your children, tell your teens they need to get a job or join a sports team or the debate club, encourage them to go out into the world and do whatever it is that they want to do.
We decide how we spend our time, who we see, when we see them, and how many people are in the room. Our time, our kids, our choice.
Senator Murphy, your help is not needed. You make it worse, not better. Leave us, and our kids, alone.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
This article was co-authored with Mary Beth Pfieffer.
In a seismic political shift, Republicans have laid claim to an issue that Democrats left in the gutter—the declining health of Americans. True, it took a Democrat with a famous name to ask why so many people are chronically ill, disabled, and dying younger than in 47 other countries. But the message resonated with the GOP.
We have a proposal in this unfolding milieu. Let’s have a serious, nuanced discussion. Let’s retire labels that have been weaponized against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, and many people like him.
Start with discarding threadbare words like “conspiracy theory,” “anti-vax,” and the ever-changing “misinformation.”
These linguistic sleights of hand have been deployed—by government, media, and vested interests—to dismiss policy critics and thwart debate. If post-election developments tell us anything, it is that such scorn may no longer work for a population skeptical of government overreach.
Although RFK has been lambasted for months in the press, he just scored a 47 percent approval rating in a CBS poll.
Americans are asking: Is RFK on to something?
Perhaps, as he contends, a 1986 law that all but absolved vaccine manufacturers from liability has spawned an industry driven more by profit than protection.
Maybe Americans agree with RFK that the FDA, which gets 69 percent of its budget from pharmaceutical companies, is potentially compromised. Maybe Big Pharma, similarly, gets a free pass from the television news media that it generously supports. The US and New Zealand, incidentally, are the only nations on earth that allow “direct-to-consumer” TV ads.
Finally, just maybe there’s a straight line from this unhealthy alliance to the growing list of 80 childhood shots, inevitably approved after cursory industry studies with no placebo controls. The Hepatitis B vaccine trial, for one, monitored the effects on newborns for just five days. Babies are given three doses of this questionably necessary product—intended to prevent a disease spread through sex and drug use.
Pointing out such conflicts and flaws earns critics a label: “anti-vaxxer.”
Misinformation?
If RFK is accused of being extreme or misdirected, consider the Covid-19 axioms that Americans were told by their government.
The first: The pandemic started in animals in Wuhan, China. To think otherwise, Wikipedia states, is a “conspiracy theory,” fueled by “misplaced suspicion” and “anti-Chinese racism.”
Not so fast. In a new 520-page report, a Congressional subcommittee linked the outbreak to risky US-supported virus research at a Wuhan lab at the pandemic epicenter. After 25 hearings, the subcommittee found no evidence of “natural origin.”
Is the report a slam dunk? Maybe not. But neither is an outright dismissal of a lab leak.
The same goes for other pandemic dogma, including the utility of (ineffective) masks, (harmful) lockdowns, (arbitrary) six-foot spacing, and, most prominently, vaccines that millions were coerced to take and that harmed some.
Americans were told, wrongly, that two shots would prevent Covid and stop the spread. Natural immunity from previous infection was ignored to maximize vaccine uptake.
Yet there was scant scientific support for vaccinating babies with little risk, which few other countries did; pregnant women (whose deaths soared 40 percent after the rollout), and healthy adolescents, including some who suffered a heart injury called myocarditis. The CDC calls the condition “rare;” but a new study found 223 times more cases in 2021 than the average for all vaccines in the previous 30 years.
Truth Muzzled?
Beyond this, pandemic decrees were not open to question. Millions of social media posts were removed at the behest of the White House. The ranks grew both of well-funded fact-checkers and retractions of countervailing science.
The FDA, meantime, created a popular and false storyline that the Nobel Prize-winning early-treatment drug ivermectin was for horses, not people, and might cause coma and death. Under pressure from a federal court, the FDA removed its infamous webpage, but not before it cleared the way for unapproved vaccines, possible under the law only if no alternative was available.
An emergency situation can spawn official missteps. But they become insidious when dissent is suppressed and truth is molded to fit a narrative.
The government’s failures of transparency and oversight are why we are at this juncture today. RFK—should he overcome powerful opposition—may have the last word.
The conversation he proposes won’t mean the end of vaccines or of respect for science. It will mean accountability for what happened in Covid and reform of a dysfunctional system that made it possible.
Republished from RealClearHealth
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The only way to restore public trust in vaccination – which has taken a big hit since the lies attending the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine – is to put a well-known vaccine skeptic in charge of the vaccine research agenda. The ideal person for this is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has been nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
At the same time, we must put rigorous scientists with a proven track record of evidence-based medicine in charge of determining the type of study designs to use. Two ideal scientists for this are Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Marty Makary, who have been nominated to lead the NIH and FDA, respectively.
Vaccines are – along with antibiotics, anesthesia, and sanitation – one of the most significant health inventions in history. First conceived in 1774 by Benjamin Jesty, a farmer in Dorsetshire, England, the smallpox vaccine alone has saved millions of lives. Operation Warp Speed, which rapidly developed the Covid vaccines, saved many older Americans. Despite this, we have seen a sharp increase in general vaccine hesitancy. Vaccine scientists and public health officials who did not conduct properly randomized trials made false claims about vaccine efficacy and safety and established vaccine mandates for people who did not need the vaccines, sowing suspicion and damaging public trust in vaccination.
What went wrong? The purpose of the Covid vaccines was to reduce mortality and hospitalization, but the randomized trials were only designed to demonstrate short-term reduction in Covid symptoms, which is not of great public health importance. Since the placebo groups were promptly vaccinated after the emergency approval, they also failed to provide reliable information about adverse reactions. Despite these flaws, it was falsely claimed that vaccine-induced immunity is superior to natural infection-acquired immunity and that the vaccines would prevent infection and transmission.
Governments and universities then mandated the vaccines for people with superior natural immunity and for young people with very low mortality risk. These mandates were not only unscientific but with a limited vaccine supply, it was unethical to vaccinate low-mortality-risk people when the vaccines were needed by older high-risk people around the world.
Since government and pharmaceutical companies lied about the Covid vaccine, are they also lying about other vaccines? Skepticism has now spread to tried-and-true vaccines that are proven to work.
And there are real, unanswered vaccine safety questions. Seminal work from Denmark has shown that vaccines can have both positive and negative non-specific effects on non-targeted diseases, and that is something that must be explored in greater depth. Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) scientists studying asthma and aluminum-containing vaccines concluded that while their “findings do not constitute strong evidence for questioning the safety of aluminum in vaccines…additional examination of this hypothesis appears warranted.”
While VSD and other scientists should continue to do observational studies, we should also conduct randomized placebo-controlled vaccine trials, as RFK has advocated. Since we have herd immunity for many diseases, such as measles, trials can be ethically conducted by randomizing the age of vaccination to, for example, one versus three years old, while spreading the trial over a large geographical area so that the unvaccinated are not all living close to each other.
I am confident that most vaccines will continue to be found safe and effective. While some problems may be found, that is more likely to increase rather than decrease vaccine confidence. For instance, it was found that the measles-mumps-rubella-varicella (MMRV) vaccine causes excess febrile seizures in 12- to 23-month-old children. MMRV is now only given as a second dose to older children, while the younger kids get separate MMR and varicella vaccines, resulting in fewer vaccine-induced seizures that scare parents. Although safety studies were inconclusive, it was also wise to remove mercury from vaccines. Even if we end up with fewer vaccines in the recommended vaccine schedule, that’s not necessarily a terrible thing. Scandinavia has a very healthy population with fewer vaccines in their schedules.
We won’t restore vaccine confidence by preaching to the choir. After the Covid debacle, Kennedy’s stated goal is to return to evidence-based medicine free from conflicts of interest. Letting him do that is the only way that skeptics will trust vaccines again, and those of us who trust vaccines have no reason to be afraid of that.
Attempts by the public health and pharma establishments to derail the nominations of RFK, Bhattacharya, and Makary are the surest way to further increase vaccine hesitancy in America. The choice is stark. We cannot let lopsided “pro-vaccine scientists” who clamp their hands over their ears at the mildest questions do any more harm to vaccine confidence. As a pro-vaccine scientist, and in fact, the only person ever being fired by the CDC for being too pro-vaccine, the choice is clear in my mind. To restore vaccine confidence to previous levels, we must support the nominations of Kennedy, Bhattacharya, and Makary.
Republished from RealClearPolitics
Author
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