By now everybody has heard the horror stories about learning loss suffered during the pandemic.

Shutting down schools for months or more, it turns out, wasn’t such a hot idea. Who could have guessed? Politicians are scrambling to escape blame, parents are getting madder by the minute, and editorialists are doing their chin-stroking think pieces about how unfortunate this all is–as if they weren’t at least as blameworthy for the crisis as anyone.

Yet the pediatric education crisis is only the most obvious of the many horrible consequences of the COVID fascist policies. Doctors on the front lines of pediatric medicine are being taught a real-time lesson in reality: immune systems work by fighting off bugs, developing defenses through exposure to bacteria and viruses. Because of this fact, the 2+ years of making children into “bubble boys” protected from every disease has made many children defenseless against the everyday bugs that plague everybody.

Oh…you thought masking and school closures and the like came at no cost?

Children NEED to be exposed to antigens; can do that with vaccines, but normally they simply have to be exposed. Slowly, steadily.

But now we secluded them for several years, and it comes to a head.

— Pradheep J. Shanker (@Neoavatara) November 1, 2022

Katherine Wu at The Atlantic tells the tale:

At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, as lines of ambulances roared down the streets and freezer vans packed into parking lots, the pediatric emergency department at Our Lady of the Lake Children’s Hospital, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was quiet.

It was an eerie juxtaposition, says Chris Woodward, a pediatric-emergency-medicine specialist at the hospital, given what was happening just a few doors down. While adult emergency departments were being inundated, his team was so low on work that he worried positions might be cut. A small proportion of kids were getting very sick with COVID-19—some still are—but most weren’t. And due to school closures and scrupulous hygiene, they weren’t really catching other infections—flu, RSV, and the like—that might have sent them to the hospital in pre-pandemic years. Woodward and his colleagues couldn’t help but wonder if the brunt of the crisis had skipped them by. “It was, like, the least patients I saw in my career,” he told me.

That is no longer the case.

Across the country, children have for weeks been slammed with a massive, early wave of viral infections—driven largely by RSV, but also flu, rhinovirus, enterovirus, and SARS-CoV-2. Many emergency departments and intensive-care units are now at or past capacity, and resorting to extreme measures. At Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, in Maryland, staff has pitched a tent outside the emergency department to accommodate overflow; Connecticut Children’s Hospital mulled calling in the National Guard. It’s already the largest surge of infectious illnesses that some pediatricians have seen in their decades-long careers, and many worry that the worst is yet to come. “It is a crisis,” Sapna Kudchadkar, a pediatric-intensive-care specialist and anesthesiologist at Johns Hopkins, told me. “It’s bananas; it’s been full to the gills since September,” says Melissa J. Sacco, a pediatric-intensive-care specialist at UVA Health. “Every night I turn away a patient, or tell the emergency department they have to have a PICU-level kid there for the foreseeable future.”

Of all the viruses out there to worry about, COVID-19 should have been near the bottom of the list of concern when it comes to children. Rather than using intelligence and reason, policymakers and some parents who got freaked out by the COVIDiots shoved every child they could into a germ free bubble to protect them from a disease that wasn’t terribly dangerous for them.

Many doctors knew that this was insanely stupid, but few had the courage to speak up. And those who did were vilified mercilessly. Some had their license to practice medicine threatened–including Minnesota’s current candidate for governor Scott Jensen.

For a while it seemed a miracle happened: kids weren’t quite so snot-nosed as usual. See! Protection works!

The long-term result? Kids are more vulnerable to diseases to which they should have developed immunity by now. And they are getting worse cases, more frequently, and winding up in understaffed pediatric ICU units. Pediatric ICU units that had often cut staff and beds because demand during the pandemic was abnormally low.

One of the great lies of public policy is that there needn’t be any trade-offs. Everything can be a win-win. Yet usually that is not the case. In the real world you balance risks vs rewards, costs vs benefits, and find messy solutions for even messier problems. People get sick, have accidents, deal with tragedies. You do what you can, but life inevitably happens. You can mitigate risks, but not eliminate them. And often you have to balance competing risks.

Yet with COVID, policy makers took the exact opposite approach, treating the virus as the ultimate evil and everything else was worth sacrificing to reduce COVID infections. This was always insane.

From the beginning of the pandemic it was obvious who was at most risk–very old and very sick people–and we should have focused our energies on protecting the people at most risk. Everybody else needed to get on with our lives.

We did the opposite. Politicians put COVID patients into nursing homes, killing off thousands of people prematurely. And at the same time they demanded children be isolated–shut up in homes planted in front of a computer to get their now revealed-to-be-worthless “education.” Not only was COVID not particularly dangerous to these kids, but lack of exposure to the unavoidable illnesses of childhood has left the kids more vulnerable to severe illness and death from common viruses.

Early on in the pandemic I got involved in the anti-lockdown movement, and I was struck by how taboo it became to refer to the immune system as a defense against illness. It was not uncommon to be accused of the most vile motives for suggesting that natural immunity can be a good and necessary thing. Vaccines depend upon stimulating the immune system, not some magic hocus pocus.

Our masters in politics and the media decided to bet on the magic, and everybody else is paying the price.

As I wrote yesterday, some are now calling for a COVID amnesty–a mass forgiveness for all the harm done by the COVID policy madness. My answer is no, not because making mistakes is unforgivable. All of us make mistakes and we all deserve more than a bit of grace when we do.

My answer is “hell no” because the COVID fascists at the top knew that what they were doing was wrong–how could they not after it became obvious?–and did it anyway. For money. For power. To transform society to their liking. That is unforgivable.

If the powers-that-be want amnesty then we need a “truth and reconciliation commission,” as they did in South Africa after Apartheid fell. Lay it all out on the table. The good. The bad. The ugly. The people who did this need to be exposed and to beg forgiveness.

Short of that, my solution is to politically destroy every COVID fascist politician and grind their careers into the dust.