Prior to Covid, parents used to joke about kids being germ warfare labs, little perpetually snotty vectors who share anything and everything at school and the playground. There was truth to it. Any parent who has sent his kid to daycare or school for the first time is acutely aware of how many germs they catch, spread, and defeat during the first few months.
With the arrival of Covid, that harmless joke has turned into a collective case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Healthy kids are all treated as suspect and potential grandma killers. In places they are fortunate enough to have school, the kids are often forced to mask, to learn in pods, to not socialize outside of people in their class, even during recess, and, worst of all, to quarantine after close contact with a student or teacher who tests positive.
For those of us in that last camp, we know the fear of seeing the school’s number pop up on our caller ID. Back in the good old days, such a call usually signaled that your kid had vomited at school. You’d grab a couple of plastic bags, hop into the car, and hope that you’d get to enjoy a mess-free ride home where you’d then fuel your kid up with Sprite and Saltines. After they were vomit-free for 24 hours, you’d send them back to school.
Now that call usually means your child has had close contact with someone on campus who tested positive for Covid. From there, the routine is similar, minus the plastic bags, Sprite, and Saltines. There is a big difference, though. Your child isn’t sick, but she still can’t return to school for however many days. When children are allowed back, they have to follow other protocols to “stop the spread.” How this stops the spread when they don’t have the virus goes unexplained.
It doesn’t matter that they don’t have symptoms and test negative. Nothing changes when the “experts” admit the truth about the uselessness of masks. When 99.97 percent of the kids forced to quarantine in one school district turned out to not have the virus, the only hope for reprieve is a lawsuit. The cases keep climbing, kids remain unaffected, yet we keep on digging the same hole because “kids are resilient.”
No, they’re not and it’s time to stop treating healthy kids like they’re sick. Enough with masks, enough with quarantining the healthy due to “exposure,” and enough with keeping kids segregated on the playground. They’re children, and we’re abusing them for the sake of neurotic adults who either can’t properly assess risk or can’t tolerate any level of risk whatsoever.
This lack of rational risk assessment isn’t confined to schools, even as that is the most visible example of the lunacy of it all. In New York City, an unvaccinated five-year-old was arrested for trying to enter a museum. Of course, the kid was defying the city’s onerous vaccine mandates.
Montgomery County, Maryland, where many who work in Washington, D.C. live, is considering an equally draconian measure. This is all despite the fact that the United States is one of the only countries that’s even pushing for mass vaccination of kids younger than 12.
The original rationale for getting kids the jab was to protect the population as a whole, but in the face of Omicron, that idea is out the window. Even Anthony Fauci has admitted as much. Given that kids are at basically zero risk from Covid, what is the point of all this, other than control?
Covid has shown us that too many are willing to bend the knee rather than face risk, any risk whatsoever, and those who want to impose such tyrannies will never stop, unless we start refusing to go along.
The first place to start refusing is when it comes to treating our healthy kids as though they’re filthy, diseased superspreaders, even when they’re feeling fine. The joke about kids being little germ warfare labs may have a kernel of truth to it, but it stopped being funny a long time ago.
