CBS News' Jan Crawford: We've Sacrificed a Generation of Kids on the Altar of Covid and They're Not Even an Afterthought to Us

Yeah I know you know that, but do you think CBS "News'" viewers know that?

Video below the fold, or at Newsbusters:

"It's the crushing impact that our COVID policies have had on young kids and children. By far the least serious risk for serious illness," she began, adding that "a healthy teenager has a one in a million chance of getting, and dying from COVID, which is way lower than, you know, dying in a car wreck on a road trip."

For the ideology that claims to represent the little guy and stand up for marginalized communities, what Crawford had to say was a direct repudiation:

"But they have suffered and sacrificed the most, especially kids and underrepresented at risk communities. And now we have the Surgeon General saying there's a mental health crisis among our kids. The risk of suicide girl suicide attempts among girls now up 51 percent this year, black kids nearly twice as likely as white kids to die by suicide. I mean, school closures, lockdowns, cancellation of sports. "

Crawford focused on the D.C. area, saying "[y]ou couldn't even go on a playground in the D.C. area without cops scurrying -- getting -- shooing the kids off. Tremendous negative impact on kids, and it's been an afterthought."

You might have missed that on CBS' Face the Nation. Not because you long ago stopped watching network "news," but, because -- as Newsbusters reports -- CBS censored and removed the segment from its program moments before it was about to air.

We know about it because they also post the full show on YouTube, but they scrubbed it from their broadcast show. See the link for details.

So I guess CBS "News'" viewers still don't know that.

But yes indeed, we have absolutely crushed the young to save the Laptop Class:

We have reduced IQs for an entire generation, reduced the ability to socialize properly, and increased psychological problems.

The nation's recent lockdown policies and mask mandates will create a generation of children who exhibit lower IQs and signs of social brain damage, according to a clinical psychiatrist for children and adolescents.

Dr. Mark McDonald cited an Aug. 11 study by Brown University (pdf) that found that "children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic," during an interview with host Cindy Drukier on a Dec. 25 episode of NTD's "The Nation Speaks." NTD is a sister media outlet of The Epoch Times.

The masks, "Zoom schools," and lockdown mandates have led to "deprivation overall, of social contact, [of] not being able to see faces, being stuck at home all day long, [and this] has actually caused brain damage to the youngsters," he said.

In another interview in the episode, professor Carl Heneghan, the director of Oxford University's Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, cited evidence that pandemic restrictions and the "fear we instill into children" has led to the worsening of psychological problems.

Heneghan cited his Oct. 2 study, which concluded that "eight out of 10 children and adolescents report worsening of behavior or any psychological symptoms or an increase in negative feelings due to the COVID-19 pandemic."

"School closures contributed to increased anxiety, loneliness and stress; negative feelings due to COVID-19 increased with the duration of school closures," the study reports. "Deteriorating mental health was found to be worse in females and older adolescents."

Even Brandon's Surgeon General is warning about the increase in suicides among teens, partly due to covid and social isolation due to lockdowns and school closures.

US Surgeon General Dr Vivek Murthy says he's alarmed by the rise in suicides among young people and says COVID has caused a mental health crisis, as parents rail against school closures and continued mask mandates.

'I'm so concerned about our children because there is an epidemic, if you will, of mental health challenges that they've been facing, and it's partly because of the pandemic,' Dr Murthy, a father of two, said on CNN's State of the Nation on Sunday.

...

Expanding onto why youngsters are suffering mentally, Murthy touched on bereavement and being denied the chance to see friends during lockdowns and school closures.

He said: 'Well, Dana, I'm so concerned about our children because there is an epidemic, if you will, of mental health challenges that they've been facing, and it's partly because of the pandemic.

'We've seen certainly that many children have lost loved ones during this pandemic, 140,000 kids lost to caregiver. We know that their lives have been turned upside down. They haven't been able to see friends as often as they would. And that's taken a toll.

...

Murthy went on to acknowledge that the 'impact of the pandemic was at least 'partly to blame' for the recent spike in child mental health issues and suicides, with many youngsters left anxious by being denied social contact with friends and teachers.

In schools that have since reopened, many continue to impose draconian rules which force youngsters to sit masked and in silence during breaktimes to try and minimize the chances of them catching or spreading COVID. In 2020, some school districts, including Clark County in Nevada, rushed to reopen after a sudden spike on suicides they feared were caused by forcing kids to try and learn at home.

Last week, Murthy's office issued a mental health advisory after unveiling alarming figures that one in five young people report experiencing symptoms of depression and one in four suffer from anxiety.

Murthy stressed -- spun -- that suicide and depression have been going up in young people for forty years, but we're seeing a sudden sharp spike since the teachers unions demanded we shut down schools so that teachers could feel like the Laptop Class.

The NYT reports on young people reverting to more immature, childlike states of develpment. This article tastelessly focuses on the plight of our poor "burned-out" Educators and School Administrators and Guidance Counselors -- won't you consider our Most Precious Natural Resources? -- but I'll excerpt around that to focus on the damage the teachers-unions-demanded lockdowns and masking regime have caused to children.

I can't believe that in this story they had to pack in the current Teachers Union propaganda point that teachers are "burned out" and need more "resources," but there you go. All stories about children will ultimately be turned into stories about giving teachers more time off and more money.

Nationally, the high school-age group has reported some of the most alarming mental health declines, evidenced by depression and suicide attempts. Adolescents have failed classes critical to their futures at higher rates than in previous years, affecting graduations and college prospects...

...

By December, referrals for the school's Student Assistance Program -- in which teams of counselors and administrators coordinate resources for troubled students -- had reached 300, compared with a total of 500 for the entire 2019-20 school year. At a recent meeting, where administrators sifted through their caseloads of "sapped" students, they described them in blunt terms: "feral," "a mess" and "work in progress."

"I think kids are just feeling like -- after witnessing Trump, political unrest, what happened in the streets with Black Lives Matter, now the pandemic -- the world's out of control," Dr. Bailey said. "So they're like, 'The world's out of control, why should I be in control?'"

Note that they blame this on Trump, but exclude teachers and teachers unions shutting down the schools and demanding dehumanizing masking policies as possible causes of stress and socialization problems.

...

"For the teachers, like all of us, they're here for the kids, not the money," Dr. Bailey said. "So to have a higher number of kids you can't reach, it's intense."

Yeah we've repeatedly seen how "for the kids" you guys are.

Say, how are you enjoying you Fridays Off program? Is that helping you restore your inner calm?

...

And while much attention has been paid to besieged superintendents and burned-out teachers, the responsibility to restore a sense of normalcy has largely fallen on principals.

So this is what I'm talking about, the article keeps saying "Let's stop talking about the trauma these kids are dealing with, let's talk about the teachers. No wait, we've talked a lot about teachers, let's talk about principals now."

No, let's go back to the kids -- what the teachers say they're all about. Remember?

You can tell that the sources for this article kept bringing the subject back to their problems as "educators."

...

Last year, 66 percent of students did hybrid learning, and more than 33 percent went completely virtual. Students and educators use terms like "re-entry," "recivilizing" and "reintegrating" to describe the transition back to a more normal routine. Covid restrictions still prevent full engagement. Masks have encouraged anonymity and discouraged dialogue.

"People don't know how to communicate anymore," said Jazlyn Korpics, 18, a senior at Liberty. "Everybody's a robot now -- their minds are warped."

Totally normal for young children and teenagers to not see human faces for one half of each day. I'm sure that has no detrimental effect on the development of the parts of their brains devoted to recognizing faces and facial expressions.

...

Josiah Correa, 18, said that while he was a senior at Liberty, "every day it feels like I'm starting a new school."

This is a little worrisome: Ninth graders playing gradeschool games.

For Nikolas Tsamoutalidis, an assistant principal, the most vivid image of the post-pandemic student body was at lunch this year, when he saw ninth graders -- whose last full year in school was seventh grade -- preparing to play "Duck, Duck, Goose." "It's like fifth or sixth graders," he said, "but in big bodies."

Hopefully they were just doing that to be silly.

Students are failing academically, so word has gone out: "get creative" to pass them by hook or by crook.

There were 185 students failing 348 classes and tension over what to communicate to teachers with the highest numbers of failing students.

"Tell them you have the freedom to be creative," Dr. Bailey told his team. Do what you have to do to get students to pass.

"I'm concerned we're going to give the impression that all kids deserve to pass," one of his colleagues shot back.

The school district had proposed a plan, based on an increase of "volatile incidents," to transfer students to online schooling as an alternative to expulsion.

"It's anti-academic, and honestly this is about trying to salvage an environment for adults," an assistant principal said of the plan.

All of this wasn't even done to "Save Grandma" -- it was done to Get Trump.

Trump said "the cure must not be worse than the disease." The political attack on him became, "Trump is not taking a maximalist approach on covid; he's treating other factors as if other factors must also be considered in designing our covid policy. To attack Trump, we must take a contrary position, and that contrary position is, No other factors matter. Only stopping covid matters. Everything else, from the economy to normal child intellectual and social development, must be sacrificed for a "zero covid policy," because we must take the opposite position to Trump in order to denigrate the sensible position he has taken."

And thus, the "Smart, Virtuous, Pro-Science People" on both the left and pseudoright gladly sacrificed a generation of children to win (or, "win") the 2020 elections, and then told themselves they were Good and Virtuous for having done so.

Even AllahPundit seems to be conceding this now -- while not admitting his own role in propagandizing for the "Only Covid Matters, We Must Be All-In On Covid to Be All-In On NeverTrump" position that has stunted the development of a generation of children.

He's just kind of pretending "Hey I've always been skeptical of this stuff." Like David French and Jonah Goldberg would later pretend to have always been skeptical of RussiaGate.

posted by Ace at 03:27 PM

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