A leading cancer specialist has claimed that covid lockdowns were this generation’s greatest error.
Writing in today’s Telegraph, Dr. Karol Sikora says:
A generation of children has been failed by a philosophy that enabled and even encouraged an industrial level of suffering. For what? A virus that posed them almost no threat, certainly no more danger than they faced on a day-to-day basis in normal pre-Covid life.
It was very early on in the pandemic that we learnt, thankfully, that the virus disproportionately affected the elderly and the vulnerable.
Young children in the vast majority of cases had a very mild, if any, reaction to the infection.
Yet policymakers still imposed on them the full force of lockdown, including the closure of most classrooms. Now the consequences are becoming clear.
Lockdown proponents claim that children are resilient and are capable of recovering from the damage inflicted upon them. My response? They shouldn’t have to be. It is criminal how millions of youngsters were used as human shields for the elderly, decimating their life chances.
Now it is reported that lockdown harmed the emotional development of almost half of all children. But that is only the tip of a vast iceberg.
They have no voice, so we have to ensure that we speak up for them.
I made my objections clear at the time and paid a price for doing so. Can others now bemoaning the lockdowns’ consequences say the same?
Don’t forget that, if some of these people had their way, we’d still have restrictions today. Masks and social distancing were recommended to stay “forever” by one senior scientist.
It’s children from the most deprived backgrounds who have suffered the most.
I have six young grandchildren and I feel immensely grateful and privileged that we had the means to shield them from the worst consequences of lockdown.
Millions of families were not so lucky.
Imagine living in a high-rise building in the centre of a city, desperately attempting to work from the kitchen table while simultaneously trying to keep your child’s education on track.
Those with no private outdoor space found their favourite parks plastered in police tape “for their own good”.
When people talk of “lockdown nostalgia”, let’s put them in that nightmare for a fortnight and then see how much they pine for further restrictions.
Those devising and implementing the rules had no real understanding of the pain they were imposing on the population.
They didn’t suffer and neither did their children – usually having large homes, leafy gardens and the time and technology available to ensure that lockdown education did not lag too far behind the real thing.
When children were finally allowed to return to the classroom, they were forced to wear uncomfortable and disruptive masks for hours on end.
Any politician or commentator supporting that dystopian nightmare should have been forced into a mask for every second they made children wear one.
I am furious. While suitcases of wine were dragged into No 10, children in the poorest parts of the country had their already-limited life chances snatched away.
There was a better way. The Swedes kept primary, lower secondary and pre-schools open throughout almost the entire pandemic.
Anna Ekstrom, Sweden’s education minister at the time, recently wrote that the downsides of closing schools “were simply too great”. Her approach has been vindicated.
While our Covid inquiry grapples with the inane question of whether Brexit helped or hindered Britain’s response, this vital subject remains unexplored.
Children were not even directly mentioned in the inquiry’s stated aims – education was mentioned just once, but the words “child” and “children” failed to originally make the cut. What message does that send?
An entire separate investigation should be launched to ask the questions that our nation’s children cannot, as rightly demanded by campaign group Us For Them.
Claiming that lockdown prevented more harm than it has caused now seems an impossible position to argue with any credibility.
The evidence mounts up and will likely continue to do so for many decades to come.
It’s time that the lockdown elite accepted that successive lockdowns, and the associated harm inflicted on Britain’s children, were the biggest policy mistake in all of our lifetimes.
