Voices for Health and Wellness

03/06/2023

I always have supported teachers' unions, but this statement seems very legitimate:
"In 2020 and 2021, like many other sectors of society, the teachers union lost the capacity for moral reasoning and developed a monomaniacal obsession with “safety.” The sentiment expressed in the infamous Chicago teachers union tweet (“The drive to reopen schools is rooted in racism, sexism, and misogyny”) exemplified the degree of hysteria in large, urban school districts. Ignoring the clear harm they were doing to children, union leaders made increasingly cruel, hypocritical, and illogical decisions.

School closures were a yearlong exercise in anti-solidarity. Teachers expected essential workers to deliver food, pick up their trash, & keep the lights on—all while the union withheld education from these workers’ children."

A former public school teacher documents the profound betrayal of America’s students

27/08/2022

From The British Medical Journal: "Restricting people’s access to work, education, public transport and social life based on COVID-19 vaccination status impinges on human rights, promotes stigma and social polarisation, and adversely affects health and well-being."

Vaccination policies have shifted dramatically during COVID-19 with the rapid emergence of population-wide vaccine mandates, domestic vaccine passports and differential restrictions based on vaccination status. While these policies have prompted ethical, scientific, practical, legal and political de...

28/04/2022

This is best article I have seen about how harmful school closures and mask mandates have been to children's learning. from the article: " Before school closures, I had nothing but respect for other teachers and for the leadership of the teachers union. But in my view the treatment of children during the COVID era has been a moral stain on the profession. During over a year of online learning, an unforgivable crime was committed against public school children and families. And as it unfolded, everyone around me said it was acceptable, necessary, and even good."

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/school-closures-covid-alex-gutentag

08/12/2021

16/10/2021

The doctors and scientists here are concerned about the lack of scientific evidence for some of the public policies around Covid. One child psychiatrist said that the lockdowns and lack of social interactions for very young children affects their IQ. If this is true, it's another troubling ramification of these short-sighted Covid policies.

A great discussion by these doctors and scientists

26/09/2021

"Here we are now, over a year and a half into the clinical experience of observing patients who were infected, and natural immunity is effective and going strong. And that’s because, with natural immunity, the body develops antibodies to the entire surface of the virus, not just a spike protein constructed from a vaccine."
-- Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Many studies confirm what he says. Instead of politically pitting the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated, the emphasis should be on immunity.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/sep/2/editorial-why-is-no-one-talking-about-natural-immu/?fbclid=IwAR1q0ZKjcZihHu6ti2IftftPxYwJrAm5aAhMXVCdF8YSNKdlAcfczzJAOIg

The Biden administration is pursuing a universal vaccination strategy, even encouraging private businesses and public universities to mandate COVID-19 shots as a prerequisite to go to work or school.

30/07/2021

There has been much media attention directed toward the Delta variant, because it appears to be a more transmissible variant of COVID. The media outlets are often not telling the whole story. A study from the UK finds that the Delta variant is far less deadly than the previous variants.
"Evolution favors variants that are more contagious — but also ones that are less deadly because killing the host reduces the chances for spread."

While Delta caused a 10 percent rise in daily US cases late last month, COVID hospital admissions actually dropped.

23/07/2021

Three distinguished medical professionals discuss how the response to COVID could have been more data based and less ideological. One of their observations, "I think many people think Zoom is what liberated us—were it not for Zoom, how bad would this pandemic have been? But my counterfactual is different. Zoom allowed a lot of upper-middle-class white-collar people the ability to work and make money and not lose their jobs, and to exclude themselves from society. That fundamentally changed the pandemic. If you went back 15 years ago, and you didn’t have Zoom, you would be facing unprecedented layoffs of wealthy, upper-middle-class people. I think a lot of businesses would have had staggered schedules and improved ventilation. Schools would have pushed to reopen." There is a class element to the official response and socially approved points of view.

https://www.persuasion.community/p/what-we-got-wrong-and-right-about?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo2NzQ5MTQ5LCJwb3N0X2lkIjozODQwOTk2MSwiXyI6Ii9KK1JTIiwiaWF0IjoxNjI1ODc4OTA0LCJleHAiOjE2MjU4ODI1MDQsImlzcyI6InB1Yi02MTU3OSIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.RVcKAbBp4KkuXDqyBqsHMqnYaizX9cWH9O-qHuC-3no&fbclid=IwAR0p0YtHYkWd2GWBj7A7mNwry1JcoYw3heHIIFnnM-LO-wxSo-gzC2_xBIM

Three public health professionals assess America's response to the crisis—and how we should prepare for the next one.

18/04/2021

Excellent four-part examination of the science.
I am normally on the side of teachers' unions, but their fear of getting coronavirus from children, and reactively trying to keep schools from opening normally, was a travesty in my opinion, and unfounded, scientifically.
Spending time with children not only does NOT increase risk for contracting Covid-19, it appears to be protective. Article quote: "The study authors believe that the mechanism for this protection is via cross-reactivity from exposure to prior coronaviruses introduced into the home by children (note, this is also one of the prevailing hypothesis on why Asian countries, where most coronaviruses originate, were not hit as hard by COVID-19)."

Back in summer, many school districts made a “deal” with parents and children. If you put masks on your kids, and allow us to severely restrict their ability to interact with other children as human beings, they can go to school. Parents were desperate, having watched the learning loss and depre...

14/03/2021

These unprecedented lockdowns and mandatory forms of social isolation have taken a toll in ways policymakers did not seemingly understand. The human brain has evolved to need in-person interaction with others, and a certain degree of mobility and social novelty. From the article, below:

"'Prolonged boredom is, somewhat paradoxically, hugely stressful,' Franklin said. Our brains hate it. 'What’s very clear in the literature is that environmental enrichment—being outside of your home, bumping into people, commuting, all of these changes that we are collectively being deprived of—is very associated with synaptic plasticity,' the brain’s inherent ability to generate new connections and learn new things,' she said."

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/03/what-pandemic-doing-our-brains/618221/?fbclid=IwAR3gOKHZNjXaaQwQow_lYbw2wCKPP2Wl8kdOHrH2IyOPDWF6h7EpZyUHIU0

We have been doing this so long, we’re forgetting how to be normal.