30 August 2021
Back in high school, two of my favourite subjects were Society and Culture, and Ancient History. It came very naturally to me to adopt the “sociological perspective” – the recognition that societal expectations and social environments shape our thoughts and actions – when learning about belief systems, methods of social organisation and cultural practices from around the world and across the ages.
I was also alternately amused and irritated by the absence in most of my classmates of what C. Wright Mills dubbed “the sociological imagination” – the ability to pull back from familiar routines and everyday situations, and to view them from a fresh or critical perspective. As a young person who frequently felt like an alien who had just landed on Earth and was trying to decipher the behaviour of its inhabitants, this sociological imagination was already part of my operating system.
While other students in my classes expressed contempt and disgust at the practices of other cultures, both contemporaneous and ancient, it was obvious to me that these practices – however incomprehensible or even heinous they might seem to Western sensibilities – made sense to the people engaged in them, given their sociocultural milieu.
It was also obvious that many of our cultural practices would appear incomprehensible and even heinous to people raised in other times and places, and furthermore, that many of those practices served no practical purpose and were therefore purely ritualistic.
All human societies engage in rituals, and all rituals are prescribed by a belief system. Each set of ritual practices would be either amusing, mystifying or appalling to people who have been enculturated into other belief systems, depending on how much those practices violated the expectations, norms and taboos of their culture.
With all that said, let’s talk about child sacrifice (how’s that for an abrupt transition?). Child sacrifice has been practised in many forms, in many different cultures, throughout human prehistory and history.
From the pre-Columbian cultures of Central and South America, to the Ammonites and Canaanites of the ancient Near East, to the pagans of the British Isles, to 21st century Uganda, adults have ritually sacrificed children “in order to please or appease a deity, supernatural beings, or sacred social order, tribal, group or national loyalties in order to achieve a desired result.”
In the last 18 months, children throughout the world have been deprived of normal socialisation, education, contact with their grandparents and other extended family members, opportunities for travel, the simple celebration of their own birthdays and those of friends, and in many cases, food, all – we are told – to contain the spread of a respiratory virus with an infection fatality rate in the same range as seasonal influenza.
Here are just a few of the horrifying results:
1. Impaired early childhood development
According to a longitudinal study of child health and neurodevelopment in the US state of Rhode Island,
“Children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic.”
Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Early Child Cognitive Development: Initial Findings in a Longitudinal Observational Study of Child Health
On every measure of early childhood development, children born after COVID-19 mitigation measures were implemented showed dramatic declines, with 27 to 37 point drops – almost two standard deviations – compared with children born pre-pandemic in measures that assess the five primary domains of fine and gross motor control, visual reception, and expressive and receptive language.
The graphs below illustrate the havoc wrought upon these unfortunate children:
Males and children in lower socioeconomic families were the worst-affected, indicating that COVID-19 policies will widen the existing gender and poverty gaps in educational attainment.
None of the children or their mothers showed evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection, ruling out the virus itself as a cause of their impaired development.
The researchers also assessed the mothers’ stress level and found that it did not explain the dramatic decline in the children’s developmental scores.
Hence, they concluded that only environmental conditions brought on by pandemic policies, including stay-at-home orders, masking, and social distancing orders that precluded interaction with extended family members and participation in playgroups and mothers’ groups, could be responsible for the children’s impaired development.
It is not clear whether the children will be able to “catch up” if and when social conditions normalise, but the authors point out that the extreme plasticity of infants’ brains places them at high risk of lasting impairment if the important processes of myelination and synapse formation are retarded by early-life neglect, insecurity, stress, and lack of stimulation.
2. Interruption to education
School closures have resulted in severe disruptions to children’s education throughout the world. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) found that over 1.6 billion learners in over 190 countries were out of school at the height of COVID-19 containment measures.
As of 31 March 2020, 167 countries had closed their schools altogether, affecting nearly 83% of learners:
Furthermore, schools in some regions of both developed and developing countries have remained closed for over a year:
This “lost year of learning” has had devastating effects on students’ educational attainment.
In the US, students were on average five months behind in mathematics and four months behind in reading by the end of the 2020-2021 school year. As would be expected, existing disadvantages have been exacerbated, with students in majority Black or Hispanic schools and low-income schools ending the year with six and seven months respectively of unfinished learning in mathematics:
High school drop-out rates have increased and fewer high school seniors, especially those from low-income families, are intending to go on to postsecondary education.
Even in The Netherlands, which is considered a “‘best-case’ scenario, with a short lockdown, equitable school funding, and world-leading rates of broadband access”, 8 weeks of remote learning due to school closures resulted in a learning loss of about 3 percentile points, equivalent to one-fifth of a school year. Students from less-educated homes suffered up to 60% larger educational losses.
Reduced educational attainment has lifelong impacts on a person’s earning capacity, health status and life expectancy.
- It is projected that US school students affected by the disrupted schooling of the past 18 months may earn $49 000 to $61 000 less over their lifetime, and that the impact of their reduced educational attainment on the US economy could amount to $128-$188 billion per year as this cohort enters the workforce.
- There is a dose response relationship between years of education and many health-related risk and protective behaviours, with those with the fewest years of education most likely to smoke, consume alcohol in excessive quantities, and eat an unhealthy diet.
- Educational attainment may be one of the strongest correlates of life expectancy. Risk of death in any given year steadily declines as the level of educational attainment rises:
“The difference in life expectancy between those with less than a high school education and those with an advanced degree is 10 to 12 years.”
Educational Attainment and Life Expectancy
3. Poverty and starvation
Government-imposed COVID-19 containment policies pushed an additional 150 million children into poverty in 2020, a 15% increase since the pandemic was declared. By September 2020, 1.2 billion children were living in poverty. While governments, NGOs and the media like to claim that “the pandemic” was responsible, this is a deliberate misrepresentation of reality.
Since the risk of COVID-19 is markedly age-stratified, people of working age – that is, those who are likely to be have dependent children – are minimally affected by the disease itself. Instead, the earning capacity of the poorest people in both developed and developing countries – and hence, their capacity to feed, clothe and house their children – has been adversely affected by policies that have forced them to stay at home rather than go out to earn a living through day labour or operation of small businesses.
While the well-to-do enjoy the privilege of working from home in their pyjamas, those engaged in trades, agriculture, transport and service industries are unable to perform their work remotely.
And as a direct result of irrational and non-evidence-based policy responses, 270 million people – many of them children – are now at risk of starvation, double the number who went hungry before the pandemic.
4. Increased rates of anxiety and depression
The terrible toll inflicted by COVID-19 policies on young people’s mental health has been extensively documented. A meta-analysis of 29 studies including 80 879 youth globally found that the prevalence of depression and anxiety symptoms has doubled since the pandemic was declared, with 25.2% of children and adolescents suffering from depression and 20.5% from anxiety. Prevalence rates have risen as societal disruptions continued, and are higher in older adolescents, and in girls.
Disrupted schooling, severely reduced opportunities for normal socialisation with friends and extended family members, cancellation of extracurricular activities such as sports and music, disruptions to daily routines, parental stress, family financial difficulties, decreased physical activities, increased screen time, death of family members due to COVID-19, confinement with abusers within their household, and an inaccurately high perception of their own risk of illness and death are all contributing factors.
On the latter point, a survey of US adults found that they had wildly inaccurate perceptions of the risk that COVID-19 poses to young people, with the average American estimating that 8% of deaths had occurred in people aged 24 and younger, when in fact it was only 0.1% of total deaths. Anxious parents and teachers will naturally impart their irrational fears to their children and students, increasing young people’s own anxiety level about their personal risk.
5. Increased suicidal behaviour
Yet while COVID-19 remains an almost incalculably rare risk of death for children and teenagers, intentional self-harm, calls to suicide hotlines, suicide attempts and completed suicides have skyrocketed.
In the US, since COVID-19 restrictions began there have been more “COVID suicides” in young people than COVID-related deaths, as vulnerable youth decide that a life without seeing their friends, playing sport, playing in a band, attending in-person school, going to parties and all the other things their parents enjoyed at their age, is simply not worth living.
In June 2021, attempted suicide rates among Victorian teenagers were reported to have increased by 184% in the previous six months, with youth hotlines inundated with distress calls from children as young as five.
Kids Helpline reported 862 attempted suicides nationally in people aged five to 25 in the six months to August 2021, and double the amount of interventions to help vulnerable teens in the past year.
In the first seven months of 2021, eight young women from Victoria (which has been subjected to the greatest number, duration and brutality of lockdowns) committed suicide, representing a doubling of the previous peak of four suicides in the same time period in 2018.
Meanwhile in New South Wales,
“In the year to July 29, 8489 people under the age of 18 were rushed to hospital for self-harm and suicidal ideation, equating to more than 40 a day. That was a 31 per cent rise on the same time in 2020 and up 47 per cent compared with 2019. Across all age groups visits to emergency departments for self-harm and suicidal ideation were up 13 per cent compared with last year.”
More than 40 NSW children and teenagers rushed to hospital for self-harm every day
While all deaths are sad, in terms of years of life lost, the suicide of a child or adolescent who might otherwise have lived for at least another 60 years, and led a productive and happy life, represents a dramatically greater loss to society than the death – whether from COVID-19 or any other cause – of an elderly person whose life expectancy is measured in months.
6. Increased obesity rates
As discussed in two previous posts (see here and here), aside from age, the primary risk factor for severe illness and death from COVID-19 is obesity. In addition, obesity raises an individual’s risk of a plethora of chronic diseases including type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, fatty liver disease and several types of cancer. And obesity that develops early in life tends to persist; at least 60% of obese children and 70-80% of obese adolescents remain obese as adults.
So it’s deeply disturbing that COVID-19 mitigation policies that have restricted children’s opportunities for incidental and structured physical activity, and dramatically increased their stress levels, have led to substantial increases in childhood obesity.
A US study found that rates of overweight or obesity rose by 8.7% among 5-11 year olds during the period from March 2020 to January 2021, a relative increase of 23.8% compared to the period from March 2019 to January 2020. Among 12-15 year olds, obesity rates increased by 5.2% during the pandemic period (a 13.4% relative increase compared to the prepandemic period), while in 16-17 year olds, obesity rates rose 3.1% (relative increase 8.3%).
Similarly, an Austrian study found that rates of childhood overweight and obesity increased during COVID-19 mitigation measures, and cardiorespiratory fitness declined.
The years of life lost due to the knock-on consequences of higher obesity rates and reduced physical activity will vastly exceed years of life lost due to COVID-19 in this age group.
7. Injuries and deaths from experimental COVID-19 injections
As of 20 August 2021, there had been 17 518 total adverse events reported to the US Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), including 1047 rated as serious, and 18 reported deaths in 12 to 17-year-olds administered experimental COVID-19 injections. Since the VAERS system is known to capture as few as 1% of adverse reactions to vaccines, and parents of children injured or killed after receiving a COVID-19 injection have attested that doctors refuse to notify VAERS despite the legal requirement to do so, these horrific numbers are most certainly underestimates.
Israeli data confirm that myocarditis – a condition in which sections of heart muscle die and are never regenerated, leaving the patient at increased risk of heart failure for the rest of his or her life – occurs in between one in 3000 and one in 6000 men ages 16 to 24 who receive the Pfizer injection. This is between 5 and 25 times the background rate of myocarditis in this population.
Meanwhile, the mother of a 12 year old girl who participated in the US Pfizer trial, and as a result is now paralysed from the waist down, is confined to a wheelchair, has a nasogastric tube because she is unable to swallow food or water, and is suffering from severe memory loss, had a video in which she described her daughter’s unrelenting suffering censored by Twitter as “misleading”.
Yet the Doherty Institute (which has extensive conflicts of interest with the vaccine industry, detailed here) has urged the Morrison government to focus on injecting young people with this experimental product as its primary strategy for reducing the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in Australia.
In other words, the Doherty Institute is instructing Australians to sacrifice the young – for whom the risk-benefit ratio of COVID-19 jabs is dramatically tipped in the direction of risk – in order to reduce the chance that the elderly may come in contact with a virus that may shorten their life expectancy by a matter of months.
8. Enculturation into safetyism
Life is risky. This is an undeniable fact. And it’s also undeniable fact that the best experiences in life require that we take risks. Asking someone out on a date, launching a business, starting a family, travelling, and even planting a vegetable garden – all these activities that make life worth living involve risk.
In the brilliant video by the Academy of Ideas, Why an Obsession with Safety creates Sick Minds and a Sick Society, the sociologist Frank Furedi is quoted thus:
“Young people are socialized to feel fragile and overawed by uncertainty [and as a result]. . .the defining feature of the current Western 21st century version of personhood is its vulnerability. Although society still upholds the ideal of self-determination and autonomy, the values associated with them are increasingly overridden by a message that stresses the quality of human weakness. And if vulnerability is, indeed, the defining feature of the human condition, it follows that being fearful is the normal state.”
Why an Obsession with Safety creates Sick Minds and a Sick Society
During the 1968-69 Hong Kong flu pandemic, which killed more Americans than the Vietnam and Korean Wars combined, teenagers partied en masse at Woodstock and the Isle of Wight music festival. The Woodstock organisers brought in a medical team in case a flu outbreak occurred, but attendees were far more intent on revelling in the music, mud and marijuana than minimising their risk.
Would anyone who attended Woodstock, Isle of Wight, or any of the other generation-defining events of the late 60s lie on their deathbed and regret that they had risked premature death from influenza to do so? I seriously doubt it.
As Academy of Ideas points out,
“In showing a strong preference for safety over risk-taking the unfolding of the human potential is not actualized, but stunted. For to develop on an individual level, and to advance as a species, exploration of the unknown and experimentation with novel ways of interacting with the world is a necessity and this entails taking risks and confronting danger. But such is a price that must be paid as the alternative is to stagnate in the confines of an ever-shrinking comfort zone, to regress in body and mind, and to fall victim to anxiety disorders, depression or other diseases of despair.”
Why an Obsession with Safety creates Sick Minds and a Sick Society
And that is exactly the situation we’ve created, not just for our children and young people but for our entire society.
There is no rational reason for any of the Orwellianly-titled “public health policies” that have led to this protracted psychological torture and proxy murder (through suicide and education deficit-related reduction of life expectancy) of our children.
Their own risk of suffering serious illness or death from COVID-19 is vanishingly small; precisely 1 COVID-19-related death has been reported in Australia since the declaration of the pandemic.
Nor do schools act as a driver of transmission. Sweden, which kept its schools open for children aged 1-16 throughout the entire pandemic, saw no child deaths and few hospitalisations, and found that preschool teachers had no increased risk of ICU admission for COVID-19, while school teachers had a 57% lower risk than other occupations.
So, if what we’re doing makes no sense by any objective standard, why the hell are we doing it? I contend that we are engaging in our version of the ancient ritual of child sacrifice. It is not a deity or supernatural being that we seek to appease, but our own fear of taking responsibility for ourselves and accepting the inherent risks of being alive.
Any person who has cheered on while children were forced into useless and harmful face masks, scolded parents who dared to host a party for their child’s birthday, opposed the reopening of schools or in any other way perpetuated the suffering of our children and adolescents, is complicit in this global sacrifice of our youngest and most vulnerable.
And what is the “desired result” that those who engage in this ritual wish to achieve? An end to all death? Zero COVID? Total abolition of all risk? Are these desired results any less irrational than those which the ancient practitioners of child sacrifice wished to attain, such as the blessings of the gods? In their defence, many of them had rather more comprehensible and meaningful goals, such as continued rainfall and agricultural productivity.
No, sacrificing children on the alter of safetyism – especially the loathesomely hypocritical safetyism of the COVID cult – is not noble, it is not considerate of others, and it does not demonstrate your bona fides as a member in good standing of a civilised society. It means you’re weak, cowardly and anti-human.
As John Stuart Mill put it:
“A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”
John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy
If you’ve ever read a book or watched a documentary on child sacrifice and wondered, “What was wrong with those people? What could have possessed them to sacrifice their own children, or somebody else’s, for such patently absurd reasons?” it’s time to exercise your sociological perspective and take a long hard look at what is being done to our children right now. And if you’re not willing to fight for your children’s rights to live in a free world, with free choice over what goes into their own bodies, what will you be willing to fight for?
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