April 7, 2022
The Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote of sailing to an imagined Byzantium because his was “no country for old men.” The pandemic has proven that the United States is no country for the young.
A new Centers for Disease Control study reveals how badly teens have suffered from COVID policies — that the CDC itself pushed.
Many of us have lamented the terrible damage done to younger children by school closures and mask mandates — years of learning loss that may never be made up. Now we learn that the isolation and anxiety that accompanied school shutdowns have taken a heavy toll on adolescents.
The CDC found that more than a third of US high-school students reported poor mental health during the pandemic. Nearly half — 44% — said they felt sad or hopeless. A horrifying near-20% said they had seriously considered suicide in the previous 12 months.
The lifeline for those who made it through unscathed? Per the CDC data, it’s an obvious one: a feeling of “school connectedness.”
Teens who felt connected to both adults and their school buddies were far less likely to experience those feelings of sadness or despair: 35% vs 53%.On suicidal thoughts, the numbers are even starker, with 14% who felt connected having such thoughts vs. 26% of those who didn’t. And when it comes to actual suicide attempts, 6% of those who felt connected made the attempt vs. 12% of those who didn’t.
These kids were twice as likely to attempt suicide if they felt disconnected.
It turns out that feeling connected to your friends and teachers is actually a matter of life and death.
This is obvious to any parent of a teen and, indeed, to anyone who remembers being a teenager.
And — more news of the obvious — school closures played a major role in destroying those feelings of connectedness, paving the way for the depression epidemic now overwhelming our kids.
The CDC admitted this, if only glancingly, in its report on the findings. What it doesn’t admit is its own role in creating this epidemic.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has created traumatic stressors that have the potential to further erode students’ mental well-being,” chirped the body’s acting principal deputy director, Dr. Debra Houry, about the new data.
But those “stressors” were, in large part, created by the CDC.
Remember that the agency served as the legitimating body for a series of absolutely catastrophic public-health measures. Of these, school closures may well prove to be the one with the worst and longest-lasting consequences — consequences borne by the most vulnerable among us, our children.
That the body co-operated with educrats like union chief Randi Weingarten, giving the American Federation of Teachers line-editing authority to weaken its reopening guidance, both adds to the shame and proves beyond any doubt that its decisions had nothing to do with public health and everything to do with power politics.
Power politics, it must be noted, aimed at those with no direct electoral voice and no meaningful economic strength.
And that’s to say nothing of the fact that the real risks of COVID to young people — which are statistically negligible for those under 18, barring serious comorbidities — were consistently overstated by the public-health powers-that-be.
The CDC using distant, clinical language to indict school closures as a cause of this mental-health crisis is like a serial arsonist soberly pointing out that the fires he set have decreased the stock of affordable housing in the area.
All without the faintest whiff of an apology.
That, however, is the standard operating procedure for our public-health establishment. Officials have made no acknowledgment of the manifold errors the CDC and other bodies made (on surface disinfection, air travel and many other subjects). Let alone any admission of responsibility for the social damage caused by the policies they endorsed — policies often described, in the hideous language of therapy, as “guidance.”
All this suggests that if we parents want our children to be both physically and mentally healthy, we need to loudly, ceaselessly and publicly demand that the CDC be held accountable.
There may be ugly consequences. Daniela Jampel, an NYC mother who dared interrupt an Eric Adams press conference to ask why the mayor did not end his insane, cruel mask mandate for kids aged 2 to 4 as promised, was fired from her city job almost immediately thereafter.
But the people who did this to our children are still in positions of power and influence. The next time a health crisis arises, they are going to try to do it again.
Don’t let them.
SOURCE: NY Post
Sam Munson is a member of The Post’s editorial board.
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