The Lie That's Destroying Children's Lives

I was a quarantine parent.

Americans and westerners in general love to talk about protecting children. They talk about how important it is to safeguard them against dangerous political ideologies or weirdos who make them uncomfortable.

Thinking about 2021, I remember an America that was far more interested in getting me back into the office and the classroom than protecting my 3-year-old daughter. I remember an America that told me not to worry about vaccinating her against a virus that was killing and disabling millions of people. I remember the eye rolls. I remember the condescending remarks about my mental health.

I remember the daily flood of reassurances:

"Children don't get sick from Covid."
"They're immune."
"Stop panicking."

I remember an America that told me if my 3-year-old daughter got sick and wound up hospitalized or permanently disabled, it was somehow her fault. I remember an America that looked at photos of dead children and asked their parents if there was something wrong with their kid. I remember an America that told grieving parents that it wasn't the virus. Their kid was just weak or damaged. That was the real reason they didn't make it. I remember it very well.

So does Jonathan Howard.

In the book We Want Them Infected, Howard lays out the years-long siege on truth conducted by narcissistic doctors and scientists. Motivated by delusions of grandeur, these quacks flooded social media with misinformation about Covid from day one. They framed the truth as fearmongering and hysterics. They promoted themselves as misunderstood geniuses.

While grifters like Vinay Prasad were fighting against vaccines for my child, real doctors and researchers like Jonathan Howard were working on the front lines, along with scores of nurses, paramedics, and EMTs who risked their lives to keep us safe. They saw what Covid actually does to healthy people. They've seen what diseases like shingles can do to someone.

They understand chronic illness.

So what happened?

In late 2020, the grifters drafted a massively influential letter known as the Great Barrington Declaration. Working alongside and on behalf of monied interests like the Koch Network, they coddled politicians with comforting lies that we could end the pandemic by forcing "healthy people without preconditions" to get infected with Covid. They would build a wall of immunity.

There was no need to wait for vaccines.

We could do it now.

This myth persists, even today. Instead of fading, it actually became part of the larger Covid mythology that if everyone gets vaccinated and infected enough times, then we'll finally beat Covid. There's no need for masks. There's no need for air purifiers. Just keep spreading the virus until it becomes mild.

How's that working for us?

Not so well...

The grifters made young people the centerpiece of their plan, especially teenagers and children. Without a shred of evidence, these corrupt doctors and researchers promoted the myth that young people didn't need to worry about Covid. They had a 99 percent survival rate. Never mind that anywhere from 10-20 percent of every age bracket deals with preconditions like asthma and diabetes. Those young people don't matter. Just let them die already.

For them, it was a small price to pay.

Of course, it's easy to let other people suffer and die for your own agenda. It's easy to decide what price others should pay.

Politicians gobbled up this self-serving message. While even conservative politicians grudgingly went along with masking and social distancing at the start, the constant bombardment of misinformation about public health and vaccines permitted and encouraged them to open up businesses and schools without a second thought about the consequences.

I remember that, too.

For those of us who live in Trumplandia, there were never any real lockdowns. At most, half of people masked at the grocery store. Businesses offered curbside pickup. Some schools spent part of the year online.

That was it.

There were no hardcore lockdowns. There were no mask mandates. There were signs on doors begging people to wear a mask, but nobody enforced it. At most, you got a few mean looks or harsh words. Nobody was forced to stay inside their homes. If your daycare closed, nobody cared. You were expected to deal with it. Your boss told you to find a babysitter.

By spring of 2021, it was "over."

Even liberals celebrated their vaccines. A majority of them ripped their masks right off, completely ignoring anyone with children under five. It took the FDA and CDC an additional year to approve vaccines for that age group, in large part because of the relentless deluge of misinformation from quack doctors and scientists. They fought child vaccination at every stage.

They made life hell for us.

We were in tears.

Jonathan Howard spends a good chunk of the book outlining the war on children's vaccines, and for good reason. The campaign against Covid vaccines has roots in all kinds of crazy theories. This same group doesn't believe in germ theory. They don't believe Measles can hurt kids, either.

They believe children are invincible.

The group that fought Covid vaccines for children also didn't believe in treating them for diseases, either. They believed that things like mechanical ventilators were hurting kids more than the virus.

Of course, they were wrong.

Now we're seeing the consequences of these disastrous policies. We're seeing what happens when you infect children over and over again with the only known respiratory virus that also infects blood vessels and organs.

Here's some of the evidence we have:

Every month, dozens if not hundreds of new studies try to warn us about the immense destruction that Covid is causing.

Kids aren't immune to Covid, or to Long Covid. They're not immune to the long term brain and organ damage it causes.

They're not invincible.

They're vulnerable.

This was always a shameful lie, cooked up by elites and puppet health professionals who were willing to trade their credentials and their integrity for money and attention. That's what they wanted.

They got it.

Even as the true cost of Covid becomes increasingly obvious, our newspapers and magazines have the audacity and the low scientific literacy to continue blaming lockdowns that barely lasted two weeks. They publish headlines about "the toll of pandemic restrictions" but not the toll of the actual pandemic. For years now, the media have platformed and indulged outrageous, mythical claims. They've said policies that actually protected children from Covid somehow hurt them. They have no evidence except for the damage itself...

The damage caused by Covid.

Now we see the plummeting test scores. We see the developmental delays. We see children and teenagers at nearly every grade level struggling to concentrate or even remember what they learned yesterday. We see them getting sick over and over again. We see their illnesses lasting longer.

We see them failing to bounce back.

It's nearly four years into Covid. By now, parents should be able to walk into a store like Target and pick up child-sized N95 masks and portable air purifiers along with school supplies. They can't.

Instead, they're fed lies.

Jonathan Howard makes one especially great point in his book. For all their noise about children and vaccines, not one of these grifters ever launched a campaign to protect vulnerable adolescents. Not one of them ever talked about masking around vulnerable children or cleaning their air.

Instead, they simply erased them. They used vulnerable children as an excuse to spread the virus that threatened their lives. If anything, they advocated against these kids, for their deaths.

They committed social murder.

Instead of putting the blame where it belongs, instead of doing anything that might actually solve the problem, the elite and the elitists prefer to double and triple down on the same old lies. Instead of going up against anti-vaccers, they ask them for forgiveness. They punch down on anyone still wearing a mask. They ignore Long Covid, giving fuel and fodder to the resurgence of anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories that try to blame the heart attacks and brain damage on the vaccines, not the virus itself. They don't care about children. Like Jonathan Howard says, they wanted them infected.

They got what they wanted.

Check out more recent stories below. If you appreciate my work, consider subscribing or buying me a coffee. I've also started a climate change list here, with links to important stories. Thank you to all the readers who support this site. It makes a big difference.