Rita Panahi: It’s time to stop sacrificing our kids’ interests to appease the Covid catastrophists

Covid catastrophists agitating for useless mask mandates on kids are pushing cruel and unnecessary measures on the least at risk group.

Science-denying doomsayers need to leave our kids alone.

Our children have suffered enough at the hands of hysterical hypochondriacs and their Covid-19 fever dreams.

The same Covid catastrophists who have been consistently wrong over the past two-and-a-half years are again agitating for further restrictions, stay-at-home orders and useless mask mandates. The chronically inaccurate dial-a-quote “experts” are back in the news, given a platform by lazy journalists, to air their dire predictions.

Funny how we never hear an explanation on why their last prediction was so spectacularly wrong.

And, they are again targeting children – the lowest risk demographic for Covid-19 – with their irrational scaremongering.

Forcing children to be muzzled during school hours is cruel and unnecessary.

Victorian students are now being asked to wear masks in schools until the end of winter. Picture: David Caird

The Dan Andrews government giving a directive that’s seen as a mandate by stealth is cowardly.

To do this in July 2022 is unforgivable given the wealth of international data that shows mask mandates do little to nothing to curb Covid rates.

As paediatric infectious disease expert Dr Shamez Ladhani, a consultant paediatrician at the UK Health Security Agency said earlier this year: “I cannot find a single study that justifies mask wearing in schools.” The BBC reported that “the (UK) government’s own study in the autumn did not provide proof of a statistically significant impact”.

Even the Covid alarmists at the New York Times have admitted that mask mandates are ineffective: “In US cities where mask use has been more common, Covid has spread at a similar rate as in mask-resistant cities. Mask mandates in schools also seem to have done little to reduce the spread. Hong Kong, despite almost universal mask-wearing, recently endured one of the world’s worst Covid outbreaks.”

Infectious disease expert and Stanford School of Medicine, Professor Jay Bhattacharya, has slammed those who advocate mask mandates particularly for children given “the lack of randomised evidence showing any efficacy from child masking”.

Former deputy chief medical officer Nick Coatsworth said it was disproportionate to expect kids in schools to take on extra measures.

Australia’s former deputy chief medical officer Nick Coatsworth, who unlike most of the state chief health officers happens to be an infectious disease physician, has also warned against taking unnecessary measures that target children. “It’s hard to see how an intervention in a school is going to save an 80-year-old in an aged-care facility, particularly when there is no strong evidence that such a measure would change the epidemic curve,” Dr Coatsworth said last week.

Federal Health Minister Mark Butler said earlier this month that the prevailing expert opinion is that the country has moved beyond mask mandates. “The message is ‘take responsibility, make your own choice’,” he said.

That message is backed up by Queensland CHO Dr John Gerrard, who like Coatsworth is a leading infectious disease specialist, who rejects mask mandates.

“I think the idea of actually having general mandates for wearing masks indoors is not something we’ll be considering,” he said last week. “These waves are going to continue for some considerable time and the idea of increasing mandates then withdrawing them, it’s just not the way to go.”

We have mountains of data from Scandinavian countries that didn’t mask children to compare to those that did or we can look at US states that masked even toddlers but had higher infection and death rates than states that didn’t impose mandates.

Or we can like the Victorian government ignore all that cold hard evidence and again impose harmful measures on children to make a diminishing number of hysterics feel better.

Just have a look at New Zealand’s current per capita infection and death rate if you need any more proof that trying to tackle an airborne virus with mask mandates is at best a flawed strategy.

Last week NZ had one of the highest per capita Covid death rates in the world, significantly higher than the UK, US and Australia. The good news is the virus’s death rate continues to fall overall.

Experts agree that people should be free to make their own choice on masks. Picture: Dan Peled

In Australia, Covid-19 currently has a lower fatality rate than a bad flu season and a comparable fatality rate to an average flu season, according to professor of medicine at Bond University, Paul Glasziou and professor of evidence-based practice, David Henry, who wrote this month: “The case fatality rate has approached 0.1 per cent. This is comparable to the seasonal influenza case fatality rate seen in “normal” flu years.”

The generation at lowest risk from death or serious illness from coronavirus has arguably paid the highest price for our response to the pandemic with their learning outcomes, social development, mental health and physical wellbeing suffering due to school closures, mask mandates and a range of other ill-considered measures.

One can only be thankful that there is an upcoming state election or we’d be subjected to even more insanely illiberal policies that ultimately do nothing in stopping the spread of a virus we’ve long known will become endemic.

Parents must treat this latest order in the same manner they treated bedwetter Brett Sutton’s playground ban. That irrational directive was only overturned because Victorians finally said “enough”.

Every parent should make a decision in the best interests of their child and clearly and calmly communicate that to their respective schools.

We can no longer sacrifice our children’s interests to appease the Covid catastrophists.