Evidence shows that children are not at risk of COVID-19 nor are they a vector of transmission. However, their mental and physical health and education has suffered due to the measures in place.
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Children as young as eight are self-harming amid an unprecedented mental health crisis fuelled by the stress of lockdown, a consultant has said.
…Mr Greenhorn said although the majority of children were in their teens, those as young as eight were being seen, which was “extremely unusual”before the pandemic.
http://archive.today/2022.01.31-170921/https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-56417014.amp
There has been a surge of teenage girls developing tic disorders and Tourette’s syndrome as a result of stress during the pandemic.
Specialists at Great Ormond Street and Evelina children’s hospitals in London have seen referrals for tics nearly double since Covid arrived, mostly in adolescent girls.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/teenage-girls-suffer-explosion-of-tics-in-lockdown-0s3rnl2nm
A request for Emergency Use Authorization in the US was submitted the same month; and the vaccine was then authorized in the US on December 11 (shortly after UK authorization on December 2).
The trial is not over, however: as all subjects are monitored for a further two year period. And the next step is to test the vaccine in groups that cannot currently receive the vaccine due to a lack of data – such as pregnant women and children (Pfizer has already started a trial in pregnant women and one in children is set to follow later this year).
Reference is made to the Request for Comments and Advice submitted 04 February 2021 regarding Pfizer/BioNTech’s proposal for the clinical and post-authorization safety data package for the Biologics License Application (BLA) for our investigational COVID-19 Vaccine (BNT162b2). Further reference is made to the Agency’s 09 March 2021 response to this request, and specifically, the following request from the Agency.
The download link is available from Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency.
Important points from this report include:
- A seven-year-old experienced a stroke.
- One child and one infant suffered facial paralysis.
- One infant had a kidney adverse event, either kidney injury or failure.
- Of the 34 cases, 24 (71%) were classified as serious.
- Predominantly female patients were affected — at least 25 of 34 (73.5%) patients.
- Table 6 reports 34 cases of use in pediatric individuals. However, 28 additional cases were excluded because details such as height and weight were “not consistent with pediatric subjects.”
- Ages ranged from two months to nine years, with median 4.0 years, which means half the children were under four years of age.
- 132 adverse events were reported in the 34 children – i.e., an average of 3.88 AEs per child.
Summary from Daily Clout journalists:
But this logic is faulty. For a start, children are almost entirely unaffected by the virus. And anyway, why should the country be held hostage because one-fifth of the population decline to protect themselves?
…Regrettably, we may unintentionally have encouraged more serious variants with lockdowns instead of allowing milder variants to circulate and ultimately prevail.
The science behind fighting Covid is difficult, and politicians need all the help they can get to interpret it correctly. Sadly, Mr Johnson has repeatedly retreated to his comfort redoubt of a handful of key advisers who seem wilfully blind to the fact that their recommendations are tearing apart the fabric of our society.
Some 8.8 million schoolchildren in the UK have experienced severe disruption to their education, with prolonged school closures and national exams cancelled for two consecutive years. School closures have been implemented internationally1 with insufficient evidence for their role in minimising covid-19 transmission and insufficient consideration of the harms to children.
EXPERTS have called for urgent action to protect children from the harm of lockdown, saying youngsters are being used in “an unethical mass experiment” and warning we are on the brink of a “national emergency”.
They are urging the Government to take urgent steps to examine and address the collateral damage that has been caused to children from issues such as school closures, lockdowns and social isolation as a result of the pandemic. One specialist is calling for a task force to be launched immediately and to remain in place for10 years, which would include experts in child abuse and neglect, childhood depression, suicide and anxiety, as well as physical, educational and developmental health.
We wanted to know whether and when babies might discover the importance of a talker’s mouth. So, in one study in my lab, we showed videos of talking faces to babies of different ages and tracked their attention by using an eye-tracking device. We discovered that babies begin lip-reading at around 8 months of age. Crucially, the onset of lip-reading at this age corresponds with the onset of canonical babbling, suggesting that babies begin lip-reading because they become interested in speech and language. By lip-reading, babies now gain access to visual speech cues which, as Janet Werker and her colleagues at the University of British Columbia have shown, are clearly perceptible to them. So, the lip-reading now enables babies to see the visible speech cues that they need to figure out which face goes with which voice. Of course, babies cannot access visible speech cues if others are wearing masks.
With many primary school pupils learning at home, and toddlers missing out on critical social interactions with their peers,parents of young children have concerns about the long-term impact of long periods spent at home.
Trapped in lockdown between the two extremes of Coronavirus deniers and lockdown orthodoxy, Nye is intrigued by Sweden’s approach: no lockdown, no school closures, no masks. She manages to secure an exclusive interview with Chief Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, whose steely resolve not to buckle under world mainstream media pressure means – among other things, tango dancing is allowed in Stockholm!
Claudia Nye is a BAFTA nominated filmmaker. Brought back to documentaries for the sake of the future of her children, Nye travels from UK to Sweden to learn about their unique Covid-19 strategy.
She is also a qualified Relationship Counsellor, which she’s been practicing over the past ten years. She travelled to Stockholm with photo-journalist Sean Spencer and together they made this documentary
Video mirrors:
Published 4th Feb 2015
This may come as a shock to those of us who still associate homeschooling with fundamentalists eager to shelter their kids from the evils of the secular state. But it turns out that homeschooling has grown more mainstream over the last few years. According to the most recent statistics, the share of school-age kids who were homeschooled doubled between 1999 and 2012, from 1.7 to 3.4 percent.
And many of those new homeschoolers come from the tech community. When homeschooling expert Diane Flynn Keith held a sold-out workshop in Redwood City, California, last month, fully half of the parents worked in the tech industry. Jens Peter de Pedro, an app designer in Brooklyn, says that five of the 10 fathers in his homeschooling group work in tech, as do two of the eight mothers. And Samantha Cook says that her local hackerspace is often filled with tech-savvy homeschoolers.
http://archive.today/2015.02.04-185234/http://www.wired.com/2015/02/silicon-valley-home-schooling/
Published 26 April 2018.
The number of children being homeschooled has risen by about 40% over three years, the BBC has found.
Across the UK 48,000 children were being home-educated in 2016-17, up from about 34,000 in 2014-15.
http://archive.today/2022.01.31-164041/https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-42624220
Depression among pupils is at ‘frightening’ levels, paediatrcians have warned, as they urge the Government to reopen schools or risk a ‘calamitous,’ impact on children’s mental health.
Ten of the UK’s top exerts in child health say anxiety, self harma nd suicidal thoughts have reached frightening levels among children.
A new study, involving over 25,000 school-aged children, shows that masks are harming schoolchildren physically, psychologically, and behaviorally, revealing 24 distinct health issues associated with wearing masks.
The health issues and impairments observed in this study were found to affect 68% of masked children who are forced to wear a face covering for an average of 4.5 hours per day. The study also includes 17,854 health complaints submitted by parents.
Some of the health issues found in the study include: increased headaches (53%), difficulty concentrating (50%), drowsiness or fatigue (37%), malaise (42%), and nearly a third of children experience more sleep issues than they had previously and a quarter of children developed new fears.
Though these results are concerning, the study also found that 29.7% of children experienced shortness of breath, 26.4% experienced dizziness, and hundreds of the participants experiencing accelerated respiration, tightness in chest, weakness, and short-term impairment of consciousness.
Analysis of the age profile of Covid infections, however, does not point to schools being especially important in the early-stage growth of the second wave. Although the report does also observe that ‘school closures can contribute to a reduction in SARS-CoV-2 transmission’.
But had schools played a big role you would expect to have seen a sharp increase in cases among children of school age a week or two following the return to the classroom. Instead, the ECDC noted that Europe’s second wave began with a sharp increase in cases among 19 to 39 year olds in mid August. Cases among 16 to 18 year olds also increased around this time, but the curve of infections among younger children rose much more gradually, in step with infection rates in the over-40s.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-role-do-schools-play-in-the-spread-of-covid-19-
The return to school of children around mid-August 2020 coincided with a general relaxation of other NPI measures in many countries and does not appear to have been a driving force in the upsurge in cases observed in many EU Member States from October 2020.
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/children-and-school-settings-covid-19-transmission
The low seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in young children in this study may indicate that they do not play a key role in SARS-CoV-2 spreading during the current pandemic.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2775656
Children are unlikely to have played a significant role in the spread of coronavirus during the first wave last year, a study shows.
Throughout the pandemic it has become increasingly evident children are less affected by Covid-19; symptoms, severe disease and death figures in children are all much lower than would be expected when compared to the rest of the population.
Figures from Public Health England (PHE) show the current risk of dying from coronavirus if infected is 1,513 per 100,000 people for over-80s, but for children aged five to nine, this is just 0.1 per 100,000.
Nursery schools present “very little risk” and are Covid-safe, vaccine minister Nadhim Zahawi has said, as he defended keeping them open.