Mark Dolan: In any normal society children come first - in the Covid pandemic they've come last

We've seen more MORAL courage, from children this week than ANY adult.

Damien McNulty, a top teaching union boss, has revealed just five per cent of pupils, at one school in Lancashire, agreed to take a lateral flow test at the start of term, and wear a mask. 5%

"Sadly," he says, "we've had reports in the last 24 hours of at least six secondary schools in the north-west of England where children, in huge numbers, are refusing to take lateral flow tests or to wear masks."

Well praise the lord. Children are saying no to endless testing, given the vanishingly small threat, the virus poses to them, and they're saying no to masks, because they clearly don't think they work. And I would give them an A star for that observation.

Don't take my word for it.

In a hastily assembled trial, the government’s own report into mask efficacy in schools, was branded inconclusive.

There's a surprise.

Perhaps these kids have simply been concentrating in biology class, and have worked out that a virus like Covid, is infinitely smaller, than the holes in those masks. The surgical and cloth masks, that most kids are wearing, harbouring INNUMERABLE bacteria, are so questionable, the authorities in Germany and Austria, don't even accept them. Although even those majestic N95 masks, aren’t arresting an explosion of cases on the continent. Crikey, it's almost like the masks, don't stop the spread.

Surely not.

So whilst the evidence around masks is inconclusive, the damage to children’s education and mental and even physical health from them, is quite clear. Some people think using the term child abuse, for masking children as young as 11 all day long in the classroom, is too strong and disproportionate. That's a debate we can have.

But locking playgrounds, putting gaffer tape, on swings and slides, closing schools, causing an estimated 10,000 kids in the course of the pandemic to disappear from from an academic setting, who haven't returned, covering their faces, exposing them to germs, and impacting their education and interactions, making them eat outside in freezing temperatures, plonking them next to an open window in midwinter, if not ABUSIVE behaviours, are surely not in their best interests. And it seems children have had enough. Of course, they don't know the half of it. 12 to 15-year-olds are being vaccinated against the advice of the government’s vaccine body the JCVI, for a jab statistically they arguably don't need, and given the huge social changes lockdowns and other measures have fermented, they will be part of a divided, more polarised and angry society as they grow up.

Oh and they will also have to deal with 2.1 trillion quid's worth of national debt.

In any normal society children come first - well in this pandemic they've come last. When it becomes clear the damage that has been done to the country they will inherit, and the impact of Covid measures on their life chances, the anger they will feel, will be hard to contain. With one question ringing in their ears in relation to a nasty virus yes, but one non-fatal to almost everyone: “what the hell were they thinking?”

Children and young people have been described as vectors of disease, super spreaders and their interests have been disregarded in favour of grandma and grandpa. What a sick and immoral role reversal. One that most grandmas and grandpas would not want to see.

Welcome to the heartless and scientifically cretinous hell of 2022.

If these politically motivated measures inflicted on our youngest members of society, those we are there to protect, continue, they will never forgive us. And why would they?

It’s time to end the cruelty, end the madness and end the war on children.