The Price of Cowardice

Whether or not you believe that death is the meaning of life-- a tenet of certain philosophies-- you surely agree that the threat of imminent demise should incite us to take all preventive measures.

Or some such. Note well-- this is not science; it is philosophy.

In effect, nations that shut down and locked down and masked up to defend their people against the Covid pandemic have been cheered. What could be worse than catching the virus and dying. Shut down the economy. Destroy the minds of young children. It was better than death. How many times did they tell us that children were resilient. 

Of course, the threats were exaggerated by public health officials and politicians looking to show off how leaderly they were. And yet, when you are willing to do anything whatever to avoid death, you find yourself, ethically speaking, following the code of conduct that defines cowardice. Avoiding all risk makes you a coward. In effect, our minds are so thoroughly saturated with a philosophy that declares death-avoidance, that is, risk-avoidance, to be the ultimate truth, that we have ignored the fact that we are defining ourselves as cowards.

Take a look around the world today, examine the political and civilizational realignment taking place, and you will see the cost of cowardice.

One often remarks that some political leaders are weak and some are strong. In truth, we should define them as courageous or cowardly. Fair enough, we agree that it is crazy to be foolhardy and trigger happy, but it is equally crazy to be gun shy to the point of avoiding all risk.

Anyway, we do not know how many deaths we avoided with our lockdowns and shutdowns, but we do know, from the great actuarial minds of the insurance profession, that non-covid related deaths increased significantly during the pandemic.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

U.S. life insurers, as expected, made a large number of Covid-19 death-benefit payouts last year. More surprisingly, many saw a jump in other death claims, too.

Industry executives and actuaries believe many of these other fatalities are tied to delays in medical care as a result of lockdowns in 2020, and then, later, people’s fears of seeking out treatment and trouble lining up appointments.

Some insurers see continued high levels of these deaths for some time, even if Covid-19 deaths decline this year.

Sane and sensible insurance executives attribute the increase to less medical care. Fewer people visited their physicians; fewer still had seemingly minor conditions diagnosed or treated. Then again, some people contracted the virus during doctors’ visits.

And then there is this. Producing mass anxiety over the virus did produce its own damage. Teenage suicide rates spiked. Mental illness increased significantly. Making people anxious does not contribute to good health. I add these points, not to contradict what the insurance industry thinks, but to add an additional factor.

While we have assured ourselves that the damage produced by school closures would only be a passing phase, easily recovered by resilient young minds, the truth seems to lie elsewhere.

Considering the simply fact that children are the group least at risk for contracting or getting very sick from the virus, it makes little or no sense that we shut down schools. As noted here before, the teachers’ union leaders who militated for this form of mental torture should be in jail today.

Anyway, the Centers for Disease Control, its credibility compromised by recent revelations that it tinkered with data in order to advance a political agenda, has now told us that children across the country have suffered a cognitive deficit for having been subject to mask mandates. It's solution-- to change developmental markers.

Jazz Shaw reports for Hot Air (via Maggie’s Farm):

For the first time in decades, the CDC has changed many of the recognized milestones for childhood development in terms of speech and cognitive functions. These markers are considered important in terms of recognizing when children aren’t progressing quickly enough, suggesting the potential need to determine if some sort of impairment is being observed and if the child may require greater medical attention. The curious thing about the changes instituted by the CDC is that in a majority of the cases, they have lowered the standards rather than raising them.

So, at a time when children were the least susceptible to the coronavirus, our excess of caution has damaged their cognitive development, measured in terms of their ability to learn language.

One of the big changes that many critics are focusing on is the former guideline saying that children should normally know approximately fifty words by 24 months or two years of age. That benchmark has now been stealthily raised to 30 months. That’s not insignificant at all. It’s a 25% increase from the previous standard.

It’s hard to ignore the growing body of reports showing that childhood development has been suffering as a result of various COVID protocols, raging from “virtual learning” environments to forcing children to wear face masks.

I have, I must add, been warning against this for many months now. Keep in mind all of the expert authorities who assured us that children were resilient and that they would easily make up the deficit.

It should go without saying that keeping the schools closed for as long as the government (and to a far greater extent, the teachers’ unions) did produced a significant negative impact on normal childhood development. 

Desocializing children, depriving them of social contact, depriving them of classroom learning, depriving them of face-to-face communication did significant damage:

The lack of interaction with their peers, frequently combined with families who had either technical or educational challenges in accessing the material and completing the assignments couldn’t have been helpful. And even for the children who were able to eventually get out of the house, wearing masks and being surrounded by both adults and children in masks robbed them of many of the nonverbal cues that are part of building language skills and social interaction tools.

It quickly became obvious that school-age children were among the least likely to spread COVID or suffer the worst effects from it. But we just kept locking everyone up and telling them to constantly wear masks. Nobody seemed to care that cloth masks were the only ones that most people could get their hands on that most of them were virtually useless.

The Victory Girls Blog has some added commentary:

But now the CDC has lowered the bar for children of 30 months — halfway between two and three years old. They now say the 50-word minimum can be applied to a two-and-a-half year old. In other words, they’re recommending that if a child is using less than 50 words on their second birthday, parents should wait another six months before taking their little crumb-cruncher to a speech pathologist. And any parent knows that six months in the lifetime of a baby or toddler is an enormous amount of time — time that may be wasted.

In order to measure the extent of the damage we turn to speech pathologists, the ones who are consulted when children fall behind on their cognitive development.

The news is not good. 

My sister who is a speech therapist in MD just texted me: “The speech issues I see with three and four year olds that have been masked I’ve never seen before in 22 years. So much low muscle tone, drooling, unusual articulation errors on early developing sounds…”

— Daniel Horowitz (@RMConservative) February 9, 2022

Horowitz also tweeted this comment from his SLP sister:

“These types of articulation errors are usually seen with children who have neurological impairments or syndromes with associated speech and language impairments. I’ve never had so many referrals in my life for young healthy children with such severe articulation impairments.”

So, bad news all around. Keep in mind, small children were the least at risk from the virus. How long it will take for them to recover is unknown. Dare we be outraged by the CDC that is attempting to cover over its own dereliction by moving the goal posts?

Bottom line: the CDC is using these new guidelines to cover for its failures with its Covid recommendations. They know that their rules for isolation and masking have impaired communication development for thousands of kids. So now they’ve lowered the bar, and in turn, can cite lower numbers of speech delays and disorders as a result. To accomplish this, the CDC used its select handmaidens in the AAP. They failed to consult the professionals who know the most about kids and their speech development.