Chris Lange, FISM News
A New York Times writer on Tuesday admitted that “Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults” in the nation’s response to COVID-19.
In a “Morning Newsletter” column titled “No Way to Grow Up,” NYT’s David Leonhardt echoed what many outside of the liberal media bubble have been saying for nearly two years: lockdowns and hybrid learning models have had devastating effects on children. Yet these and other legitimate questions about these and other mandates, when posed by conservatives, have consistently been met with ridicule and conspiracy-theory accusations from the left-leaning media and Democratic politicians.
“American children are starting 2022 in crisis,” Leonhardt wrote. “I have long been aware that the pandemic was upending children’s lives. But until I spent time pulling together data and reading reports, I did not understand just how alarming the situation had become.”
The writer went on to acknowledge that “children fell far behind in school during the first year of the pandemic and have not caught up,” and noted the emotional toll prolonged lockdowns and remote-learning models have taken on kids and adolescents.
“Many children and teenagers are experiencing mental health problems, aggravated by the isolation and disruption of the pandemic,” he said, citing an October Declaration of a National Emergency in Child and Adolescent Mental Health published by the American Acadamy of Pediatrics and two other medical groups revealing a sharp uptick in mental health problems, including adolescent suicide attempts, since the end of 2019.
“For the past two years, large parts of American society have decided harming children was an unavoidable side effect of Covid-19,” Leonhardt wrote. “And that was probably true in the spring of 2020, when nearly all of society shut down to slow the spread of a deadly and mysterious virus.”
He further questioned the logic of causing children to “suffer” for the actions of adults who refuse to get vaccinated, though both the Centers for Disease Control and President Biden have acknowledged that the highly-transmissible Omicron variant is infecting, and being spread by, the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike.
Leonhardt concluded that Americans “have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults, often without acknowledging the dilemma or assessing which decisions lead to less overall harm.”
Some conservatives were quick to mock the 11th-hour concession, however, particularly Leonhardt’s statement on Twitter that he is unsure whether “people fully grasp the depth” of the crisis:
We do grasp the depth of it. We've been saying this for two years but people like you ignored us and now you're pretending this was some kind of epiphany you had on your own. https://t.co/ComJrrYrsu
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) January 4, 2022
Many grasped it long ago. “Kids are resilient” isn’t an answer. I got resilient kids, they went through some sh*t bf a pandemic. My job then & now: ensure they endured as little damage as possible, not congratulate them for being resilient while making them suffer for my anxiety. https://t.co/IPZysL2Fo8
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) January 4, 2022
In recent weeks, some on the left have softened, or completely reversed, their former pro-lockdown stances as Americans are becoming increasingly fed up with mandates that have done little to stop the spread. On Sunday, Dr. Anthony Fauci said the benefits of in-person learning outweigh the “deleterious” effects of keeping children out of school. Education Secretary Miguel Cordona on the same day stated: “We’ve been very clear, our expectation is for schools to be open full-time for students for in-person learning.”
The Daily Wire’s Tim Meads, however, isn’t letting liberals off the hook so easily, writing, “This latest New York Times column is more evidence that the Left has been incorrect for quite some time regarding governmental policy response to the virus, and unable to admit that they are now adopting conservative positions on the subject.”