Children

Betrayed by our society

“Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.” Jesus Christ

Children are precious; a gift from God to be cherished, nurtured, protected, cared for and loved.

Most people would probably agree with this statement, even if they may not accept that children are a gift from God. However, our society, along with many across the world, put these values to one side during the ‘covid era’. It may be more accurate to say that our society trampled all over these values and the children they are meant to protect.

As I write, it is over four years since the first ‘lockdown’ in our country. I watched the effects of lockdowns and other measures on my own children as well as the children of others. I remember, very early on, listening to someone warning of the potential harms to children which would be inflicted by lockdowns, and especially to those most vulnerable; those warnings were ignored. My concern for the welfare of children was one of the primary drivers of my opposition to lockdowns and other covid measures. The other main driver was my Christian faith which enabled me to discern the destructive and evil forces at play.

I watched as the ‘experiment’ unfolded. I did what I could to advocate proper treatment of the children around me, and I listened to the voices who were speaking into the situation with reason, compassion, common-sense and moral judgment. These voices were too few, but they were fearless and determined.

This article summarises what happened, the harms caused, who should be held to account, and what lessons must be learned. I have drawn from my own experiences and from a number of sources, but primarily from ‘The Children’s Inquiry’ by Liz Cole & Molly Kingsley. I can highly recommend this book as a disturbing but important read.

A note at the start to say why this is a pressing issue and why you should read on. Children are too often overlooked in our society, and this was certainly the case during the ‘covid years’. A society which tramples over the most vulnerable cannot be called civilised and must be called to account. The UK covid-19 inquiry has been underway for some time, and is proving to be a behemoth with great capacity for devouring vast sums of tax-payers money, without properly addressing any of the important issues which need investigating. The original scope for the inquiry didn’t even mention children. After this was pointed out, amendments were made and it was recently announced that a module would be included to look at ‘Children and Young People’. The hearings for the inquiry are not due to finish until 2026. Thankfully, Liz Cole and Molly Kingsley have done much of the necessary work for them. The question is: will they listen? As a society, do we really care?

What our society did to children

The easiest way to summarise the extent of the ‘covid measures’ inflicted on children is to list them. Bear in mind that from an early stage it was known that covid posed little or no risk to healthy children. Harms caused to children were almost entirely due to covid measures and not to the virus itself.

• School closures - including nurseries, playgroups and colleges. Closures were for weeks or months at a time; sometimes complete closure and other times closed to particular year groups or other groupings (for example closed to children of ‘non-essential’ workers). Once testing began, children would be sent home from school for a number of days or weeks if they tested positive for covid, or had been in ‘close contact’ with someone who had. Sometimes this was whole classes, sometimes it was particular groups of children.

  It should be remembered that before 2020 school closures were not a part of established pandemic plans, except in very extreme circumstances.

  As Professor Robert Dingwall explains, “When I was involved in pandemic flu planning around 2005, 2006 we were always very clear that schools would never close, unless there were so many teachers off sick that you couldn’t provide a safe environment for the children. We were thinking a threshold of maybe 30, 40% of the teaching staff”. The Children’s Inquiry, p212.

  This is not what happened. There were not vast numbers of teachers off work sick with covid. In fact there were very few.

• Home ‘learning’ - the idea was that children would do their school work at home. Sounds simple enough, but what if home is chaotic, cramped, noisy or abusive? Often parents were also having to work from home, and a number of siblings were having to do school work at home with limited space and facilities. Some parents felt enormous pressure from schools to get work completed, which became increasingly difficult as the novelty for children soon wore off, and in many cases a downward spiral of frustration and disengagement began.

• School restrictions - As a parent, I cannot adequately describe how appalling school environments were for children when they were eventually ‘allowed’ back, under various restrictions and measures. My children were in primary and secondary schools at the time, and I know that our headteachers were among the more reasonable, yet it was an awful experience even for us. In secondary schools children were masked and teachers were masked, hampering communication and causing a raft of harms. Hand washing and hand ‘sanitising’ became an obsessive ritual. One-way systems, segregated areas, restrictions on play and lunchtimes, no sport, no music, no arts, no social activities, no parents or visitors from outside. “Just sit still in your socially distanced spot, wearing your mask and ‘learn’ please” seemed to be the expectation. Teachers even had boxes marked out at the front of their classroom so they didn’t stray near the children (note this was to protect the teacher, not the other way round). Any decent teacher or sensible human being should understand that you cannot possibly teach effectively under such conditions.

  April Mackay, a teenager who blogs about her experiences, writes: “As I’ve described so many times, school was like a prison or a punishment. It was full of teachers … treating us like criminals who’d done something wrong … going crazy if we spoke to someone in another year we’d missed since March, took off our masks, went in the wrong ‘area’, hugged anyone or had too much fun. For a couple of weeks, they made my year group sit in classrooms at break, facing the wall and not being allowed even to turn our heads … The school had a horrible, tense, smothering atmosphere and felt like a place you went to be punished. By Christmas, we’d had all we could take with lockdown and school being hell. Almost everyone’s mental health was in bits. So a second lockdown wasn’t a relief - it was the thing that broke us. It was three months of emptiness”. The Children’s Inquiry, p21.

• Reductions/curtailment of children’s services - including social work, health visiting, support for vulnerable and disabled children, medical care and respite support. In many cases these services provided a lifeline for children and families and they were simply stopped overnight.

• Social isolation - playgrounds were shut, children’s sports, clubs and youth groups stopped and children were prevented from seeing family and friends.

• Testing - when schools eventually re-opened, children were issued with testing kits and most schools expected children to be tested daily before going to school. Children with particularly zealous parents had already been subjected to testing even before the schools reopened. These ‘lateral flow’ testing kits involve invasive swabbing of the nasal cavities and throat, by untrained parents (or children themselves). Who knows how many ‘false positives’ resulted, and let us hope that children were not physically damaged by these procedures which were far from pleasant (and no doubt far from accurate). Any reports of ‘positive cases’ resulted in a ripple of consequences. Sometimes whole classes were sent home to ‘isolate’, and sometimes just ‘close contacts’ after an Orwellian review of who the child had been seen to be in the vicinity of the previous day.

• Masks - children were expected to wear masks on school transport, in school corridors and even in the classroom. Some children were wearing masks for 8 or more hours a day. The masking of children became a ‘norm’ in society, and I even know of parents who made their children wear masks in the home. I wrote an article on the mask last year, exploring why it was such a disturbing intervention.

• Vaccines - the experimental gene therapy medications unleashed on the population in 2021 were only intended for adults, and originally only for the older age groups and ‘vulnerable’.

  In November 2020 the then Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, had said “this is an adult vaccine, for the adult population”. The Children’s Inquiry, p169.

  Gradually the target age groups became lower and eventually included children, despite the JCVI (Joint Committee on Vaccination & Immunisation) taking the view that the potential health benefits of vaccination in children did not outweigh the potential risks. Remember that we always knew that healthy children were at virtually no risk from covid. So, a medication which posed an unknown risk to children (and by that point significant side effects in adult recipients were being acknowledged) was given to children who were at no risk from the virus. Why would a society do such a thing? With the erroneous and unethical belief that it would benefit those adults who were at some risk? This has chilling implications.

  They were telling the children who they were injecting that they were doing it for other people … What are you meant to make of that as a child? “So I am here to have my body used for the benefit of other people?” Dr Clare Craig on the Owl & Badger podcast.

  These injections were given in schools, and in some (thankfully not in our school) children were injected without the consent of parents via a misuse of the ‘Gillick competence’ ruling. Misleading messaging was also deliberately aimed at children. For example, on an episode of the children’s programme Newsround (which I watched) Professor Devi Sridhar of the University of Edinburgh claimed that trials showed the vaccine to be 100% safe for children. This was not true. It was a claim which could never be made for any medical intervention, but particularly not for one involving a new technology and which had received incomplete safety testing. This was just one example of the propaganda used to ‘persuade’ people (including children) to receive the vaccine.

  The ethics of trying to pressurise people into vaccination through sweeteners (“vaccines are the surest way to put covid behind us and for students to reclaim the freedoms that enrich university life”) or threats (“you owe it to others to get the vaccine yourself”) reflect not the morality of personal responsibility, arising from our Judeo-Christian foundations, but the immoral bullying of a quasi-religious cult.  Rev Dr William Philip, The Critic article.

The harms our society inflicted on children

Again, the easiest way to summarise the myriad harms is to list them. Some are well documented and have been observed already, but the longer term harms can only be predicted.

• Anxiety and harms to mental wellbeing - after reading through the above list of what was done to children, and over a period of several years, we cannot be surprised to find a resulting epidemic of anxiety, depression, insecurity and other problems in children. Children thrive and develop to their full potential in an environment which is secure, sociable, predictable and stimulating. Our society inflicted the exact opposite upon them.

  Teenagers, suffering a pre-pandemic wave of prior mental health issues, experienced an exacerbation of existing problems and an explosion of entirely new crises. Emergency referrals for crisis care increased by 62% compared to 2020, and in 2021 a staggering one million referrals of children were made for specialist mental health services. The Children’s Inquiry, p14.

  Ask anyone who works with children and they are likely to be able to describe the afflictions and lasting damage they see every day.

  Rod Grant is a headteacher who was one of a handful of school leaders to speak out unambiguously about school closures. These are his words, written during the height of the 2021 nationwide shutdown. “In the last three months, in my school and schools like it, I am witnessing mental health issues unlike anything I’ve seen in my career. This is not me trying to be dramatic or to overplay what lockdown actually does to children. I am seeing children being diagnosed with clinical depression, increasing rates of self-harm … suicidal ideation and, something I haven’t seen for at least 20 years, a resurgence of eating disorders … Children need to be with their friends. They need to play. They need to develop their social and academic skills. How dare we have created an environment where a five-year-old can say, I can’t play with Freddie because he’s not part of my bubble. It is the stuff of nonsense and it is our children who will end up being this lockdown’s collateral damage”. The Children’s Inquiry, p78.

• Loss of education - months on end of disrupted, sporadic or completely absent education will have serious consequences, and particularly for those children who were already vulnerable. The gaps in education, the missing building blocks, the negative effects on confidence, development, social skills, ambition, work ethic - all of these will affect the life chances of a whole generation of children, and only time will tell just how serious that will be.

  Unicef, in a haunting statement timed to coincide with International Education Day on 24 January 2022, commented: “In March, we will mark two years of covid-19-related disruptions to global education. Quite simply, we are looking at a nearly insurmountable scale of loss to children’s schooling”. The Children’s Inquiry, p63.

• Loss of socialisation - isolating children, removing their social networks and activities, masking the faces they see - these will have negative consequences not only for school-aged children but also for pre-school children in the critical years of development.

  In the first few months of the pandemic, we received an email from a clinical psychologist who was deeply concerned about the regime of interventions as applied to children. She wrote of her disbelief at the plans, saying “You cannot enforce social distancing in a fundamentally social species without serious negative consequences”. The Children’s Inquiry, p15.

  Physical as well as social consequences have resulted from the disruption to development in children.

  The president of the British Paediatric Neurology Association has spoken of an ‘explosion’ of children with lockdown-induced disabling tics disorders and Tourette’s syndrome; studies also show permanent eye damage in children from increased screen time during the pandemic. The Children’s Inquiry, p70.

  In April 2022, an Ofsted report into early years children recorded that: “The pandemic has continued to affect children’s communication and language development, and many providers noticed delays in their speech and language progress. The negative impact on children’s personal, social and emotional development has also continued, with many children lacking confidence in group activities”. The Children’s Inquiry, p80.

• Loss of milestones and rites of passage - birthdays, starting toddler group or pre-school, starting school, leaving school, sitting exams, getting exam results, prom celebrations, graduation ceremonies, school trips - these are all significant points in children’s lives which cannot be replayed; once lost they are gone forever.

  The authors of The Children’s Inquiry, Liz Cole and Molly Kingsley, wrote this about their own children in 2022 and I would echo their experience:

  We have spent two years watching as four happy children by turns became sad, angry, demotivated, confused, had rites of passage and life opportunities taken away from them and friendships curtailed. We are very conscious that each of those four children was one of the lucky ones: we have been horrified and humbled by some of the testimonies we’ve heard and read. The Children’s Inquiry, p167.

• Abuse and neglect - the most vulnerable children in our society were abandoned; dropped in an instant. For many of these children school is the only secure and reliable thing in their life, and it was removed overnight. In many cases, contact with the professionals who were meant to look out for the welfare of these children also disappeared.

  Schools are more than educational settings; they are wellbeing hubs and, for the most vulnerable, a sanctuary. We feared from the outset that loss of schooling would lead irrevocably to a safeguarding catastrophe, and so it proved. Despite the assurances that schools would welcome vulnerable children during the first lockdown, 94% did not attend. This absence was no mere blip; it was a trend, and we now know that close to 100,000 children never returned fully to school after closures. The Children’s Inquiry, p13.

  I remember, early in the first lockdown, hearing a health professional warning that the incidence of child abuse would rocket.

  In England, within weeks of the first lockdown, Great Ormond Street Hospital reported a 1,493% rise in cases of abusive head trauma. The Children’s Inquiry, p24.

• Care and support - children with disabilities, child carers (who have a caring role, often for a parent), children in residential care - these were all affected in multiple ways. Family members were prevented from visiting and providing care and support for children in residential care. In many cases support, respite and contact with health professionals was removed overnight.

  Sara is an eight-year-old child. She has cerebral palsy, epilepsy and complex needs that require input from a range of therapists and healthcare workers. She has severe learning difficulties and is behind academically. As Sara’s father says, “My daughter did not see a physiotherapist, a paediatric consultant, an epilepsy consultant, an occupational therapist, an orthopaedic surgeon, an optician or a GP for the best part of two years. She was denied the right to attend school for almost an entire year. She was deprived of the health benefits and pure joy normally afforded by her weekly sessions of hydrotherapy and riding for the disabled. Her mobility declined. Her mental health suffered terribly. Her seizures got to the point where they lasted so long that she was turning blue and choking. We have almost lost her several times”. The Children’s Inquiry, p93.

• Masks - many children were forced to wear masks, sometimes for large chunks of the day. This was despite there being a distinct lack of conclusive evidence for any benefits, and increasingly concerning potential harms.

  The WHO defines child maltreatment … as ‘all forms of physical and emotional ill-treatment, sexual abuse, neglect, and exploitation that results in actual or potential harm to the child’s health, development or dignity’. It is our view that society’s masking of children in circumstances where there is little evidence base for the measure, plenty of evidence of harm … comes uncomfortably close to meeting this definition. The Children’s Inquiry, p61.

  

  (Image by artist Bob Moran)

  Not only were children harmed by the wearing of masks themselves (for example: headaches, nausea, infections, stress, anxiety, breathing difficulties), but even little children were surrounded by masked faces. I remember picking up my children from primary school and parents were expected to wear masks, outside. So little children came out of school to a sea of expressionless masked faces, as if the adults needed protecting from them. I refused to do such a thing, and made a big effort to smile at all the children!

• Vaccines - the list of recorded side-effects resulting from these experimental medications is too long to include here, but you can get an idea from the government’s yellow card reporting system. A particular risk was identified for boys and young men from myocarditis (damage to the heart muscle). How many children (including those in the womb) and young people have been harmed by these experimental medications? We don’t know, but we do know that the yellow card system is far from perfect and suffers from significant under-reporting, and pressure is mounting for the data on adverse reactions and excess deaths to be more transparent.

Accountability

Who should be held accountable for all of this? Most people did not speak out in defence of children, and those who did were silenced, vilified and punished. There are a number of groups in society who should have spoken out and who, in the main, failed to do so.

• Churches - almost all of the main church denominations in our country followed government ‘rules’ and guidelines seemingly gladly, and some even came up with additional ‘gold-plating’ above and beyond what was asked of them. Church organisations provided ‘vaccination centres’ in their buildings to encourage people to receive the jabs, and coercive and misleading messaging was promoted through the ‘Your Neighbour’ initiative (which we covered in the very first episode of the Owl and Badger podcast).

  Most church leaders, with notable exceptions, failed to speak into and challenge the fear narrative and failed to question what was going on. Considering that very few church leaders are willing to address the issue of abortion which results in the deaths of many, many thousands of babies every year in this country, perhaps we should not be surprised that so few spoke out against the measures which caused so much harm to children. It is shameful, and the church must repent of its cowardice and reflect carefully and prayerfully on what happened so it can learn lessons for the future. Even greater challenges are sure to come.

• Teachers - with a few notable exceptions, most teachers and headteachers went along with government ‘guidelines’ and the powerful lobbying of the teaching unions. Many of the measures imposed on children could have been fought under the banner of ‘safeguarding’ and duty of care for the wellbeing and education of children. Instead of putting children first, the unions peddled a fear narrative that painted children as disease spreaders and a risk to adults, which could not have been further from the truth. If I had my way, every teacher and teacher’s union worker would be required to read ‘The Children’s Inquiry’ as part of their professional development.

  …the government elected to close schools for a second time in January 2021. Having full knowledge of the harms at this stage, the decision surely represented the nadir of pandemic decision-making. And here, in our view, linking events to union influence is a far simpler matter … on 3 January 2021 the NEU wrote to its members saying that “it would, in our view, be unsafe for you to attend the workplace in schools and colleges which were open to all students”. The following day, Boris Johnson announced a third national lockdown that included school closures. The Children’s Inquiry, p126.

  Is it unreasonable to expect teachers and those who work with children to put the welfare and wellbeing of children as a high priority?

  That school had ceased to be a nurturing, perhaps even safe, environment for children, is a sentiment we heard expressed often. “I am growing increasingly concerned about my child’s welfare in school”, one parent writes. “I am beginning to feel that no-one in the school cares a damn about the children”, says another. The Children’s Inquiry, p22.

  So few teachers spoke out publicly against what was done to children, but headteacher Mike Fairclough was an exception, paying a heavy price for his determination to do what he believed to be right and in the best interests of children.

  As the only UK headteacher to publicly question lockdowns, masking kids and the covid vaccine rollout to children, I was not alone in my beliefs. Other headteachers privately told me that they agreed with my stance but that they worried that voicing their concerns would impact on their careers and relationships. This is despite every education professional having a legal as well as a moral duty to safeguard children against harm. Mike Fairclough, Brownstone Institute article.

• Doctors - again, very few doctors and medical professionals seemed willing to speak out in defence of children. Few questioned the ethics of inflicting medical interventions on children such as testing, masking and covid vaccines. Doctors should have been best placed to assess the genuine risk of covid, and should have advocated the (voluntary) protection of the vulnerable, whilst ensuring the rest of the population could continue to function and access regular healthcare. This was the approach advocated by the Great Barrington Declaration which received hostile opposition. Doctors should also have been best placed to question the safety and efficacy of rushed vaccines and novel vaccine technology, and question why early treatments were not being encouraged. A ‘stay home and do nothing until you are so sick you need hospital treatment’ policy seemed to be in place, and most doctors seemed to go along with it.

  In the summer of 2021 I wrote to my GP asking why their practice was persisting in sending letters and text messages to try to persuade me (a fit and healthy 45 year old) to have the covid vaccine, along with my two children. He replied, informing me that the vaccinations had been given to millions of people and the risk of significant side effects seemed very low indeed. He asserted that the very small risk of blood clots is far, far lower than the risks of clots associated with covid infection. He stated that the vaccination is very effective at almost entirely eliminating the risk of severe disease. He asserted that not only does vaccination benefit me, but it also benefits society as a whole by reducing my risk of passing on infection directly or via others to a person who ends up with severe disease or complications. He ended by telling me that he personally has no misgivings about his children receiving the covid vaccination, and they are far more likely to benefit from it than to be harmed. These were extraordinary assertions for him to make even at that time, and he gave no evidence or figures or links to any published research to back up any of his claims. Perhaps they all came from the fount of wisdom that is the BBC? Perhaps I should write to him again to ask whether he would like to modify any of his assertions in light of the evidence that was available at the time, and since.

  In our recent podcast interview with Dr Clare Craig, I asked her why so many medics seem to have followed the narrative without question. She said that in medicine there is a problem where a lot of doctors have been trained on protocols.

  “Their entire time in medicine has been a culture where there are guidelines and protocols and ways to do things and you really are just plugging people into algorithms. I think it is terribly sad that doctors can’t see how going down that path makes them redundant.” Dr Clare Craig on the Owl & Badger podcast.

  In a chilling move, presumably to get more children vaccinated, there was even a financial incentive for doctors to vaccinate children.

  NHS GPs were paid differing fees depending on whom they vaccinated, with almost double payments in August 2021 for injecting a child aged 12-15 years. Dr Rosamond Jones, Children’s Covid Vaccines Advisory Council (statement for The People’s Vaccine Inquiry)

• Parents - I spoke to many parents during the covid years, and was shocked at how most of them questioned so little of what they were being bombarded with, and what their children were having to endure. I was expecting to have to defend my own children but, perhaps naively, expected most other parents to do the same for theirs. I suppose this shows the power of propaganda and the use of fear which can be effective even against what should be one of the strongest impulses: to protect one’s child.

  I knew many parents who were routinely testing their children, masking them, enforcing social distancing and so on. Perhaps the most extreme and upsetting example I encountered was a Mum with two young children. A sweet lady who clearly loved her children, but she relayed to me what had happened a few weeks before when one of her children (who also had some learning difficulties) had ‘tested positive’ for covid. She separated him from the rest of the family in a room on his own, wouldn’t let him near anyone and kept him masked. For how long this went on I don’t know. I struggled to hold back tears as I tried to gently explain to her that he really was of no risk to the rest of the family, and taking those measures would make no difference to whether or not the others in the house caught the virus. Here was an example of how a loving parent can be persuaded to inflict what I would argue is child abuse on their own children, given enough fear messaging from the government. It truly was the stuff of Orwellian nightmares.

  Another stumbling block for many parents was the covid jab. Despite being told repeatedly by politicians that the vaccine was only for adults (initially only for adults in the more ‘vulnerable’ groups), eventually the creep down through the age groups reached children. Initially I assumed that no sensible parent would allow their child to have the injection, but soon realised that many parents were not even willing to question it. They seem to have a naive assumption that any injection offered to their child must be a good thing. This was despite a year or more of exposure to the virus which showed that healthy children were at virtually no risk from it. Sadly, I know of several teenage boys with covid vaccine damage including one case which has been medically confirmed as a direct result of the vaccine.

• Professionals working with children - As well as teachers and doctors, there are many other professionals whose job it is to work with and be an advocate for children. For example social workers, children’s mental health teams, youth workers, health visitors, children’s charities. Where were their voices when children were undergoing such harms? A few spoke out, but most seemed to keep quiet and just accept the almost total collapse of children’s support and advocacy services in every field.

  Those who did speak out in defence of children, as with others, were met with a barrage of abuse and accusations.

  From almost day one of launching UsForThem (to campaign for children to be prioritised during the pandemic response) we’ve been targeted by unfounded accusations of misinformation, … anti-vaxxers, granny killers … the animosity of these claims has often seemed to increase proportionately with the level of publicity the campaign has attracted. The perversity of being slurred, and labelled ‘extreme’, for maintaining positions that until 2020 would have been entirely consistent with previous pandemic planning, medical ethics and public health practice, grates and confuses. The Children’s Inquiry, p147.

• Politicians - It is becoming increasingly difficult to expect much courage or moral fibre from our politicians, but their almost complete inability to question what happened during the covid era, and in particular in relation to the welfare of children, was still quite astonishing. Again, the very few who have spoken out against the ‘official’ positions have been met with ridicule, intense opposition and even sanctions. Most notable has been the MP Andrew Bridgen. Despite being thrown out of the Conservative Party, he continues to ask difficult questions around the covid vaccines, excess deaths and adverse reactions. He opposed the vaccination of children and has been vocal in criticising the official UK covid-19 Inquiry.

  Politicians are (or should be) servants of the people, and as such they should be held to account for decisions they make which they know will cause harm, especially when that is harm to children. Here is an excerpt from a letter I wrote to the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Spring 2021:

  What are you trying to do to our children? Do you not care about the damage you are causing? Are you not listening to the children’s mental health workers who have been warning you for months? You are sacrificing the health, wellbeing, futures and even lives of children for some notion of ‘protecting’ adults. That is morally indefensible. Perhaps this (school closures) is just about placating the teaching unions? Shame on you. There are children up and down this land who are in misery, who have lost hope, who see no point in life, who are self-harming, who wish they were not alive, and the tragedy is we will lose some to suicide. This is not inevitable! You need to stop now. Stop the testing, stop the masks, stop the restrictions, let children go to school, learn and be children again. I will never bow to your obsession to beat a virus at all costs. It will not work. In the name of ‘protecting the NHS and saving lives’ you are wreaking harm and destruction on a monstrous scale.

  The Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, repeatedly warned the government of the dangers of covid policy decisions to the interests of children, but she was apparently ignored. Politicians cannot claim they did not know what would happen and the harm that would result from their decisions.

  Harmful errors were not corrected because those responsible deliberately destroyed the fundamental error correction systems that are necessary in democratic society. Free speech, a free press, the right to protest, parliamentary debate, and cabinet collective responsibility are not just nice to have. They are all fundamental to a functioning democratic society and need defending and strengthening. Of course every leader is responsible for their actions but those who deliberately break these mechanisms of error correction were choosing a path where harm would be more likely to result. Therefore they cannot defend themselves by saying they “did not know”. They must therefore take full responsibility for the consequences of their actions. Dr Clare Craig, Expired, Covid The Untold Story.

Lessons to learn

More than four years on from the first covid lockdown, some may say that it is time to put it all behind us and move on. However, when wrong is done, when harm is caused, and when ethical lines are crossed, there needs to be consequences and there needs to be lessons learned in the hope that such failings will not be repeated in the future. There were not simply ‘mistakes made’; there was wilful blindness, lies, coercion, propaganda, ignoring of safety signals, covering up of inconvenient data, breaking of ethical codes; sin and evil on a grand scale.

This sorry story must be heard and these horrors inflicted on children must not be allowed to happen again. Those responsible must be held to account, and every effort should be made to repair the damage done.

It is hard to take in what we have allowed to happen to children in this crisis. We adults should hang our heads in shame … We must never let the vile ‘inversion of nature’ of the past two years happen to children again. Professor Ellen Townsend, University of Nottingham, May 2022.

As a society we failed our children terribly. We sacrificed their wellbeing in the (false) hope of protecting ourselves, the adult population. This goes against the fundamental instinct and ethical wiring of humanity: to protect children.

At the end of the day, what is manifest in the treatment of children I found hard to square with any kind of principle of the wellbeing, the welfare of society. It’s revealed something very dark … There are lots of things you can do to adults, but I really didn’t think we could do this for young people or that anyone would be up for that. I just didn’t think it was possible. Professor Sunetra Gupta, Oxford University.

During the ‘covid era’ I encountered multiple older people who had come to view children as a ‘risk’ to them, like rats who carry disease, because of the propaganda they had imbibed. Gossip spread about the latest school to have an ‘outbreak’, when in fact all that was happening was that children were being continually tested and then groups sent home as soon as a ‘positive’ test arose. I knew people who made an active effort to avoid children, even walking across the road to keep away from them. Words such as ‘vector’, ‘threat’, ‘dirty’, ‘selfish’, ‘super spreaders’ have been used.

Our language matters, and the process of dehumanising begins with the words we use. At too many points during the pandemic, the language used to describe children and young people has framed them as a danger rather than as vulnerable members of society to be cherished, nurtured and championed. The Children’s Inquiry, p150.

Lockdowns and covid measures took so much of such critical importance away from children. Time cannot be rewound for them.

What is lost or denied at the beginning of a life is not necessarily obtained or regained later … That an Ofsted report should find such basic life experience knowingly denied to millions of our youngest is appalling, unforgivable and shaming. This is nothing less than neglect. Wholesale neglect by society of the most precious and vulnerable resource we have. All of it was avoidable and should have been avoided. Neil Oliver, 2022.

It is a high calling and responsibility, given by God, to raise, nurture and care for children.

Returning to my opening lines and the words of Jesus in Matthew 19, he rebuked those who tried to prevent the children from coming to him. In the previous chapter Jesus called a little child and told his followers that unless they humble themselves like a child they will not achieve greatness. He goes on to give a stark warning:

“Whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me. But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” Matthew 18:5-6

To conclude, as a society we did cruel and unethical things to our children, causing great harm, and all in the name of ‘science’, to ‘protect’ adults and for a notion of ‘the greater good’. In my view these were acts of devotion to false gods, and nothing more than pagan idolatry and hubris. Those most responsible must be held to account, and we must collectively ensure that such things are never done again. History shows us that humans are slow to learn lessons from the past, and we easily repeat the same errors of judgement. There will be a next time, and each of us must be ready and willing to make a stand, to speak out, and protect our children. No matter the cost.