Horowitz: A freedom spring after the dark winter of tyranny?

It's not just when you're having fun that time flies. I can't believe it's nearly 11 months since my first article noting that locking down and masking children is a crime against humanity divorced from all science. Yet here we are almost a year later, entering a new spring season, with children being forced to mask in school (assuming they are even in school) and being wrongly treated as vectors of spread rather than the future of our country. The consequences are unfathomable and will plague us for years to come.

Last week, CBC News reported that McMaster Children's Hospital in Hamilton, Ontario, saw a 90% increase in children admitted for eating disorders, along with a tripling of children patients admitted after suicide attempts over a four-month period.

The culprit? A "lack of social interaction, increased conflict at home, and the inability to rely on friends as main contributors."

As a result, the hospital has also seen double the admissions for drug-related psychosis.

Sadly, there is nothing unique to Canada. It's occurring everywhere in the world where children were shut out of school and where adults selfishly projected their own fears upon children. In places like Los Alamos, New Mexico, emergency responders saw a tripling of suicides during the first eight months of the lockdowns. In August, the CDC reported that 25% of young adults considered suicide, yet the agency has failed to fundamentally change its policies in the ensuing months.

It didn't have to be this way. Even if one agreed with the unprecedented masking and social isolation of adults, the science was clear from day one that children were less at risk either to get sick from or to spread the virus than from typical seasonal pathogens. We could have left children alone to live much of their normal lives and routines.

Ironically, in September 2019, just months before the coronavirus outbreak became apparent in Wuhan, Johns Hopkins wrote a paper for the World Health Organization gaming out "Preparedness for a High-Impact Respiratory Pathogen Pandemic." Hopkins, which became a leading voice for lockdowns just a few months later, warned about the severe consequences of "non-pharmaceutical interventions" (NPIs).

"During an emergency, it should be expected that implementation of some NPIs, such as travel restrictions and quarantine, might be pursued for social or political purposes by political leaders, rather than pursued because of public health evidence," warned the team from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. "WHO should rapidly and clearly articulate its opposition to inappropriate NPIs, especially when they threaten public health response activities or pose increased risks to the health of the public."

Well, several months later, those political NPIs are exactly what Hopkins recommended. Officials destroyed the health of a generation of children, all for politics, when they knew from day one that this virus was not a danger to children. The evidence from day one showed lockdowns of children would be all pain and no gain, yet Hopkins refused to heed its own advice from September 2019.

"It is necessary to further study the effectiveness of NPIs in a variety of contexts to ensure that they are employed properly with a strong evidence base, and that the value of taking any specific NPI intervention in a particular pandemic setting is not outweighed by the potential harm," warned the authors, prophetically. "It is important to communicate to political leaders the absence of evidence surrounding many NPI interventions and the adverse consequences that may follow them."

To this day, we never hear a word from people like Anthony Fauci or CDC Director Rochelle Walensky about the negative consequences of COVID cult-like living on children or anyone else. In fact, this is not even a case of the consequences outweighing the benefits, because there are zero benefits to lockdown. We didn't need 12 months of evidence after lockdowns were implemented to predict they'd fail. The same Hopkins paper predicted this just months before. Here is the money quote:

In the context of a high-impact respiratory pathogen, quarantine may be the least likely NPI to be effective in controlling the spread due to high transmissibility. To implement effective quarantine measures, it would need to be possible to accurately evaluate an individual's exposure, which would be difficult to do for a respiratory pathogen because of the ease of widespread transmission from infected individuals. Quarantine measures will be least effective for pathogens that are highly transmissible, have short incubation periods, and spread through true airborne mechanisms, as opposed to droplets.

It was known from day one that this virus was highly transmissible like a cold and that there was no way we could stop the spread of it as we could of Ebola. Shortly afterward, it became apparent that this virus is transmitted through aerosols, not through droplets, which is why it spread like wildfire even after all the measures were strictly adhered to. It's also why masks became useless.

If one had to list the pros of masking and isolation on one side of a paper, and the short and long-term harms on the other side, the pro side would be blank and the con side would not have enough room to enumerate all of the ways we are destroying the social, mental, emotional, physical, developmental, and educational health of our kids.

Now, as more kids finally return to school, the same people who destroyed their lives for a year are now suggesting that they should strictly wear masks and be yelled at all day for not wearing them properly. "Oh, it's just a mask, what's the harm?" they ask. Yet anyone with a modicum of common sense understands that a mask, aside from the physical harms, serves as a constant reminder for children to needlessly fear this virus and one another. Would we ever treat our pets this way?