The COVID lockdown bill is coming due and it's already murderously high

"We had no idea!"

A few days ago we took a look at the beginning of the Great COVID Lockdown Whitewashing, in which we witnessed the start of what will surely be a years-long walkback of support, and shifting of blame, for the destructive, anti-scientific COVID mitigation measures first put in place in early 2020. That whitewashing is going to be critical for many people to retain their outward respectability as the destruction wrought by those policies becomes ever-more apparent over time.

Case in point: After two years of school closures and insane mitigation policies and nonstop COVID hysteria in schools, national test scores are…well, you know:

National test results released on Thursday showed in stark terms the pandemic’s devastating effects on American schoolchildren, with the performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading dropping to the levels from two decades ago.

This year, for the first time since the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests began tracking student achievement in the 1970s, 9-year-olds lost ground in math, and scores in reading fell by the largest margin in more than 30 years.

The declines spanned almost all races and income levels and were markedly worse for the lowest-performing students. While top performers in the 90th percentile showed a modest drop — three points in math — students in the bottom 10th percentile dropped by 12 points in math, four times the impact.

It’s bad. In fact, it’s very bad. And I say that as someone who largely despises all forms of institutionalized education and believes that the benchmarks established by it are arguably sort of meaningless. I do believe that—and yet even a cynic like myself can read the coming armageddon in these numbers. It is very bad indeed.

The New York Times is reporting on this gut-punch as if it came out of nowhere. My goodness, is it not the most predictable thing you could have possibly imagined? If you shut down schools nationwide, relegate children to a protracted period of functionally useless “remote learning,” and then reopen schools with a confounding series of mitigatory plexiglass barriers and stressful distancing rules and miserable, humiliating, dehumanizing masking policies—what do you think is going to happen to their standardized testing scores? Do you think they’ll go up?

The Times alleges that this fallout is due to “the pandemic,” but of course it is not; it is due to the response to the pandemic, and specifically due to the response we instituted in order to protect the absolutely least vulnerable demographic within this pandemic. Children are, by-and-large, at a statistically 0% change of dying from COVID; there are barely enough pediatric deaths to register in the official numbers. According to UNICEF, in June children from the ages of 0-9 constituted about 0.1% of the total COVID deaths worldwide. I would hazard that the vast majority of them were probably immunocompromised to some degree—all of them unthinkable tragedies, no doubt at all, but none of them representative of the overall risk that COVID poses to children. And yet we still shut it all down and put a great many millions of children on the path to academic catastrophe and considerably more difficulty and struggle in life.

Why we did that is a complex and worthwhile subject that we’ll explore in more detail later on. For now the most important lesson is this: The bill is coming due for what we did in 2020 and 2021. It’s coming in more highly than you think it will. It’s not going to get resolved this year, or the next year, or the next five years; the negative effects of it all will be playing out in supremely difficult fashion for at least the next decade, probably more.

And the most critical thing to recognize amid all the fallout is this: The people and the institutions—up to and including the Times̛—who supported the lockdowns and the closures and the shutdowns and the remote learning and all of it are going to be scrambling to cover up their own involvement in what has already happened and what has to come. Here’s the Times this week reporting on former Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson’s reaction to the test scores—Jackson, who herself was instrumental in shutting down Chicago schools and keeping them closed:

“No more of the arguments, and the back and forth and the vitriol and the finger pointing,” she said. “Everybody should be treating this like the crisis that it is.”

“No more of the finger pointing.” Uh huh. Expect plenty more of this moving forward. And don’t be fooled by it. The arguments need to be made and the fingers need to be pointed. This cannot be allowed to happen again.