New Peer Reviewed Evidence That Covid School Closures Harm Children

In truth, the evidence presented below has been known since the very beginning of ‘global pandemic’ state of emergency brutally imposed by governments worldwide. 

The jury is already in. The idea that shutting schools is not without multi-level collateral damage to both children and their families – should be put to rest now. To date, there have been no credible evidence presented to show that pandemic policies such as school closures and mask mandates reduce viral transmission to any significant degree, not to mention that fact that these offers no discernible benefit for children who are already at statistically zero risk of ever getting ill from Covid-19.

It’s also worth noting that the lack of any real evidence that children are somehow ‘asymptomatic spread’ vectors of coronavirus who are placing teachers and other adults in the community at risk – should also put that argument to bed too.

Moreover, the utility of these findings can also be extended to the issue of a vaccine mandate for student. Why place a child at risk of vaccine injury when their risk profile for Covid-19 is non-existent?

Given the preponderance of verifiable scientific evidence which demonstrates how reactionary policies such as school closures – recklessly instituted by governments and teachers unions – have resulted in mass harms and damage to hundreds of millions of children worldwide, we must now carefully examine the evidential case and balance of risks related to closing schools in the future.

Still, it is not at clear whether pro-lockdown technocrats are prepared to abandon this dangerous new tool of social control.

The British Medical Journal reports…

During the first pandemic wave in 2020, to reduce the number of social contacts and therefore transmission events that occur in schools, many countries, including the UK, closed schools for lengthy periods as part of broader social lockdowns.1

There is now clear evidence that pandemic related school closures harm children. Prolonged school closures bring high risk of poor mental health, obesity, and child abuse, as well as loss of learning.2 The National Mental Health of Children and Young People study showed that likely mental health disorders in English children and young people increased from 1 in 9 to 1 in 6 during the pandemic.3 The National Child Measurement Programme found that childhood obesity in England increased by 4.5% from 2019 to 2020/21.4 School closures reduce the visibility of children at risk, with medical referrals for child protection falling 36%-39% during the pandemic.56 Due to sensitive periods of brain and cognitive development, this generation of children’s loss of learning during the pandemic cannot simply be compensated for by catch-up work at a later date and will contribute to poorer health and lower life expectancy in the long term.7

Given this catalogue of harms, we must carefully examine the evidential case and balance of risks related to closing schools.

or previous variants of SARS-CoV-2, the evidence that closing schools reduces community transmission is surprisingly weak.8910 A systematic review found mixed evidence that school closures and reopenings affected community transmission, with a number of higher quality studies finding few or no associations.8910 Within households, children and young people transmit SARS-CoV-2 infection at similar levels to adults.11 However, studies have found that secondary attack rates from children are lower in school settings than in households,12 particularly when mitigations are in place.

Evidence from the largest known schools study, the School Infection Study, suggested that prevalence of antibodies among teachers in England in Autumn 2020 was similar to comparable adults in other professions.13 The study also provided evidence that SARS-CoV-2 infection prevalence was lower among children tested on the school site than in the community in the summer term of 2021, when, as well as a policy of isolation of “bubble contacts” of those with identified infection, in secondary schools regular home-based testing was available and recommended for both staff and students.14 Studies have also found that schools successfully implemented a range of preventive measures with high fidelity.15

View the rest of this study at the BMJ

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