Post by Nadica (She/Her) on Sept 6, 2024 1:48:21 GMT
False divisions and dubious equivalencies Children’s rights during the COVID-19 pandemic - Published June 18, 2024
Introduction
In January 2022, nearly two years after the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), millions of students, educators, and parents around the world, including in the United States (US) protested that no student should have to risk their health for education (Pinsker 2022) However, many Western governments—led by Sweden, the United Kingdom (UK), and the US—have chosen to ignore calls for public health and safety. As Sweden adopted the least protective approach to community transmission, contrarian physicians in the US and UK advanced the anomalous Swedish example for in-person schooling without mitigations, particularly as soon as pediatric COVID-19 vaccines were in sight. Despite proving false for previously-vaccinated age groups, the most controversial and oft-mistaken contrarians—inexpert in social or behavioral sciences—claimed that ending school masking requirements would incentivize parents to vaccinate younger children, whose vaccine uptake never reached adequate levels despite the implementation of this advice (MSNBC 2022). Public admissions of such mistakes have never led to correcting the policies based on them. Instead, the lack of health and safety in schools resulting from zero-mitigation policies continues to cause great physical and psychosocial harms to children and families.
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic—the worst global health crisis in over a century—at least 10.5 million children in the world have lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19, tens of thousands of children have died, and millions have suffered disability (Bellandi 2022; UNICEF 2022). The pathway of SARS 2 infection is through the respiratory system, but COVID-19 (or COVID) is a multisystemic, vascular, and neurotropic disease with immunological effects that often renders survivors vulnerable to other infections and morbidities (Smadja et al. 2021; Temgoua et al. 2020; Zhou et al. 2020). Although the vast majority of those infected live past the initial, acute phase of infection, survivors of COVID-19 are at substantial and cumulative risk for Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC), also known as Long COVID, regardless of age, vaccination, or health status (Iacurci 2022).
Life expectancy has fallen in four out of five OECD nations during the pandemic, and dramatically in the US, reversing decades-long gains (British Medical Journal 2022). Long COVID is a chronic manifestation of COVID-19 after the acute phase of infection with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, or SARS 2), with prolonged effects and substantial global prevalence (Chen et al. 2022). Each COVID infection carries between a one-in-five and a one-in-eight chance of progressing to Long COVID within about a month or more of infection, with recent studies reporting as high as nearly one-in-two prevalence (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2022d; Van Beusekom 2022). Long COVID commonly causes chronic fatigue, neurological damage, psychological disorders, memory impairment, confusion, and numerous other serious and lasting sequelae in healthy people across age groups, such as blood clots, heart attacks, and a three-fold increased risk of death within a year of a non-severe infection (Al-Aly, Bowe, and Xie 2022; Salari et al. 2022; Uusküla et al. 2022; Xu, Xie, and Al-Aly 2022). Long COVID experts admonish against current policies of mass infection, asserting the need to create awareness of this “urgent problem with a mounting human toll” (Ballering et al. 2022; Kikkenborg Berg et al. 2022; Lopez-Leon et al. 2022).
Princeton historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor describes the US toll of death and disability as “surreal,” which official estimates undercount (Taylor 2022). More than one million Americans died in fewer than two-and-a-half years, exceeding four thousand deaths per day several times (Taylor 2022). More than 7 percent of the US population (twenty-three million people) suffer from disabling Long COVID, causing more than half a million Americans to become unemployed (Iacurci 2022; British Medical Journal 2022). While comprising only 4 percent of the global population, the US has the highest COVID-19 death toll in the world, has fared worse than peer countries, and has accounted for approximately one-quarter of global COVID infections and one-sixth of deaths (Bennett and Cuevas 2022; World Health Organization 2022b).
COVID-19 is the leading infectious cause of death in US children, and among the top five causes of pediatric death overall, even after vaccination (White House 2022a). US COVID mortality has exceeded four decades of AIDS mortality (Thrasher 2022, 9–10). However, in the third year of the pandemic, 4,100 COVID deaths per week—more than a weekly September 11 mass casualty event—has been treated as unremarkable by US media and politicians (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2022a; British Medical Journal 2022). Public health scientists, physicians, economists, and other experts representing the consensus view of the pandemic warn that “Leaders and policymakers must not accept or normalise our dangerous current status quo,” including through minimization of hazards, which lead to widespread dissemination of false beliefs (British Medical Journal 2022). Yet, leading the way, after Sweden and the UK, the US government has ended effective COVID public health mitigations, despite ongoing and escalating need for public safety measures. Other nations, such as New Zealand and Singapore, loosened otherwise stringent national safety protocols only after achieving significantly lower per-capita death rates and making considerable public health investments to secure their populations during upcoming surges (British Medical Journal 2022).
In the US and UK, poverty, gender, and race are the strongest determinants of disease burden, encompassing public-facing workers in health, service, and retail sectors (Sustainable Development Solutions 2022; Taylor 2022). Those with fewest resources carry the greatest burdens. COVID fatality rates, and therefore COVID health concerns, are consistently far higher among Black, Latinx, and other US racial minority groups (Pew Research 2021b). Counties experiencing the highest death rates are those with average poverty rates of 45 percent (Taylor 2022).
Nations that consistently implement public health measures and/or have better infrastructure for health, safety, and education see more equitable outcomes across various socio-economic metrics. The zero COVID policies of New Zealand, Australia, China, and Pacific Island nations experienced relatively rare mortality and low morbidity overall in proportion to their populations than laissez-faire nations, translating to roughly eight to ten times lower case fatality rates (Our World in Data 2020–2022; World Health Organization 2022a). Nations in which mitigations are normalized, such as the Republic of Korea and Japan, have experienced remarkably lower mortality and morbidity (Our World in Data 2020–2022). Cuba took the approach of closing in-person schools indefinitely and used the widely accessible medium of state television to broadcast national curricula during school days so that schoolchildren could continue engaging educational material from home or settings outside of school (Goodman 2021a). Cuban leadership explained that they based this decision on epidemiological and experiential understanding that viruses transmit most efficiently among children in school settings, and as a result, focused on developing a COVID vaccine for children first.
Depending on the state and timing, US pandemic response has fallen along a continuum ranging from aiming to eradicate or contain the virus (most protective) to laissez-faire (least protective), the latter of which became the dominant national approach (Bai et al. 2022; Gretchen 2020; Long et al. 2022; Normile 2021; Yang et al. 2022). Laissez-faire refers to minimal regulations in the public interest by the state, and prioritization of “free market” activity and individual “choice” (Scott and Marshall 2009, 405). Laissez-faire nations deprioritized children’s vaccination, focusing instead on protecting the elderly, who, in the US, enjoy far greater wealth, political power, and governmental spending and benefits than children (Corsaro 2015, 308–314).
Research on children’s rights during the pandemic inadequately addresses the ways children’s rights to life, health, and safety have been falsely rendered oppositional to education and child development under the guise of championing children, uncritically accepting dominant narratives underwriting laissez-faire policies (e.g., Adami and Dineen 2021). This chapter reviews scientific studies, news articles, surveys, and statistical data involving experts and policymakers, and finds that the dominant narrative of school reopenings manufactured a “debate” that created false divisions and dubious equivalencies between different sets of children’s rights. Despite scientific and international-legal consensus on children’s rights to life, health, and safety as fundamental, the protection of these rights during the pandemic was rendered adversarial to child development, psychosocial well-being, and children’s economic, educational, and social welfare rights. Dominant discourse also ignored socio-economic disparities or leveraged them in ways to promote in-person schooling without mitigations.
How and why this occurred is analyzed from an intersectional perspective, meaning that inequities and injustices resulting from harmful policies are understood as having systemic and historical roots along the lines of race, class, gender, and generational disparities, which are reproduced in and through law, politics, and policy (Crenshaw 1998). An intersectional approach shows that violations of children’s rights to life, health, and safety are occurring through the exploitation and reinforcement of longstanding structural inequities, while creating new ones. Laissez-faire policy regarding childhood education has been driven by politics and power, against scientific consensus and public opinion. Coordinated inauthentic actions, disinformation campaigns, and political violence are considered within the scope of politics and power disfiguring public policy in violation of children’s rights.
The adoption of laissez-faire pandemic policies has occurred through at least three primary means, including (1) minimization or denialism and mythologizing regarding the harms of COVID-19 to children and their network effects; (2) a moral panic of pediatric mental health and academic attrition blamed on mitigation measures; and (3) political prioritization of narrow, short-sighted economic aims that insist upon labor and schooling in unsafe spaces despite the availability of effective mitigations. A policy of no policy during a global public health emergency has created a crisis of children’s rights in which life, health, safety, and education are routinely undermined, with poorer socio-economic outcomes. This requires corrective reframing of pandemic policy to combat disinformation, normalize mitigation of communicable disease, and prioritize children’s rights, needs, and perspectives. This chapter aims to expose violations of human rights through laissez-faire pandemic policy within the larger goals of generating critical awareness of their modus operandi and prevention of further systemic harms.
Introduction
In January 2022, nearly two years after the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), millions of students, educators, and parents around the world, including in the United States (US) protested that no student should have to risk their health for education (Pinsker 2022) However, many Western governments—led by Sweden, the United Kingdom (UK), and the US—have chosen to ignore calls for public health and safety. As Sweden adopted the least protective approach to community transmission, contrarian physicians in the US and UK advanced the anomalous Swedish example for in-person schooling without mitigations, particularly as soon as pediatric COVID-19 vaccines were in sight. Despite proving false for previously-vaccinated age groups, the most controversial and oft-mistaken contrarians—inexpert in social or behavioral sciences—claimed that ending school masking requirements would incentivize parents to vaccinate younger children, whose vaccine uptake never reached adequate levels despite the implementation of this advice (MSNBC 2022). Public admissions of such mistakes have never led to correcting the policies based on them. Instead, the lack of health and safety in schools resulting from zero-mitigation policies continues to cause great physical and psychosocial harms to children and families.
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic—the worst global health crisis in over a century—at least 10.5 million children in the world have lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19, tens of thousands of children have died, and millions have suffered disability (Bellandi 2022; UNICEF 2022). The pathway of SARS 2 infection is through the respiratory system, but COVID-19 (or COVID) is a multisystemic, vascular, and neurotropic disease with immunological effects that often renders survivors vulnerable to other infections and morbidities (Smadja et al. 2021; Temgoua et al. 2020; Zhou et al. 2020). Although the vast majority of those infected live past the initial, acute phase of infection, survivors of COVID-19 are at substantial and cumulative risk for Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC), also known as Long COVID, regardless of age, vaccination, or health status (Iacurci 2022).
Life expectancy has fallen in four out of five OECD nations during the pandemic, and dramatically in the US, reversing decades-long gains (British Medical Journal 2022). Long COVID is a chronic manifestation of COVID-19 after the acute phase of infection with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, or SARS 2), with prolonged effects and substantial global prevalence (Chen et al. 2022). Each COVID infection carries between a one-in-five and a one-in-eight chance of progressing to Long COVID within about a month or more of infection, with recent studies reporting as high as nearly one-in-two prevalence (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2022d; Van Beusekom 2022). Long COVID commonly causes chronic fatigue, neurological damage, psychological disorders, memory impairment, confusion, and numerous other serious and lasting sequelae in healthy people across age groups, such as blood clots, heart attacks, and a three-fold increased risk of death within a year of a non-severe infection (Al-Aly, Bowe, and Xie 2022; Salari et al. 2022; Uusküla et al. 2022; Xu, Xie, and Al-Aly 2022). Long COVID experts admonish against current policies of mass infection, asserting the need to create awareness of this “urgent problem with a mounting human toll” (Ballering et al. 2022; Kikkenborg Berg et al. 2022; Lopez-Leon et al. 2022).
Princeton historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor describes the US toll of death and disability as “surreal,” which official estimates undercount (Taylor 2022). More than one million Americans died in fewer than two-and-a-half years, exceeding four thousand deaths per day several times (Taylor 2022). More than 7 percent of the US population (twenty-three million people) suffer from disabling Long COVID, causing more than half a million Americans to become unemployed (Iacurci 2022; British Medical Journal 2022). While comprising only 4 percent of the global population, the US has the highest COVID-19 death toll in the world, has fared worse than peer countries, and has accounted for approximately one-quarter of global COVID infections and one-sixth of deaths (Bennett and Cuevas 2022; World Health Organization 2022b).
COVID-19 is the leading infectious cause of death in US children, and among the top five causes of pediatric death overall, even after vaccination (White House 2022a). US COVID mortality has exceeded four decades of AIDS mortality (Thrasher 2022, 9–10). However, in the third year of the pandemic, 4,100 COVID deaths per week—more than a weekly September 11 mass casualty event—has been treated as unremarkable by US media and politicians (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2022a; British Medical Journal 2022). Public health scientists, physicians, economists, and other experts representing the consensus view of the pandemic warn that “Leaders and policymakers must not accept or normalise our dangerous current status quo,” including through minimization of hazards, which lead to widespread dissemination of false beliefs (British Medical Journal 2022). Yet, leading the way, after Sweden and the UK, the US government has ended effective COVID public health mitigations, despite ongoing and escalating need for public safety measures. Other nations, such as New Zealand and Singapore, loosened otherwise stringent national safety protocols only after achieving significantly lower per-capita death rates and making considerable public health investments to secure their populations during upcoming surges (British Medical Journal 2022).
In the US and UK, poverty, gender, and race are the strongest determinants of disease burden, encompassing public-facing workers in health, service, and retail sectors (Sustainable Development Solutions 2022; Taylor 2022). Those with fewest resources carry the greatest burdens. COVID fatality rates, and therefore COVID health concerns, are consistently far higher among Black, Latinx, and other US racial minority groups (Pew Research 2021b). Counties experiencing the highest death rates are those with average poverty rates of 45 percent (Taylor 2022).
Nations that consistently implement public health measures and/or have better infrastructure for health, safety, and education see more equitable outcomes across various socio-economic metrics. The zero COVID policies of New Zealand, Australia, China, and Pacific Island nations experienced relatively rare mortality and low morbidity overall in proportion to their populations than laissez-faire nations, translating to roughly eight to ten times lower case fatality rates (Our World in Data 2020–2022; World Health Organization 2022a). Nations in which mitigations are normalized, such as the Republic of Korea and Japan, have experienced remarkably lower mortality and morbidity (Our World in Data 2020–2022). Cuba took the approach of closing in-person schools indefinitely and used the widely accessible medium of state television to broadcast national curricula during school days so that schoolchildren could continue engaging educational material from home or settings outside of school (Goodman 2021a). Cuban leadership explained that they based this decision on epidemiological and experiential understanding that viruses transmit most efficiently among children in school settings, and as a result, focused on developing a COVID vaccine for children first.
Depending on the state and timing, US pandemic response has fallen along a continuum ranging from aiming to eradicate or contain the virus (most protective) to laissez-faire (least protective), the latter of which became the dominant national approach (Bai et al. 2022; Gretchen 2020; Long et al. 2022; Normile 2021; Yang et al. 2022). Laissez-faire refers to minimal regulations in the public interest by the state, and prioritization of “free market” activity and individual “choice” (Scott and Marshall 2009, 405). Laissez-faire nations deprioritized children’s vaccination, focusing instead on protecting the elderly, who, in the US, enjoy far greater wealth, political power, and governmental spending and benefits than children (Corsaro 2015, 308–314).
Research on children’s rights during the pandemic inadequately addresses the ways children’s rights to life, health, and safety have been falsely rendered oppositional to education and child development under the guise of championing children, uncritically accepting dominant narratives underwriting laissez-faire policies (e.g., Adami and Dineen 2021). This chapter reviews scientific studies, news articles, surveys, and statistical data involving experts and policymakers, and finds that the dominant narrative of school reopenings manufactured a “debate” that created false divisions and dubious equivalencies between different sets of children’s rights. Despite scientific and international-legal consensus on children’s rights to life, health, and safety as fundamental, the protection of these rights during the pandemic was rendered adversarial to child development, psychosocial well-being, and children’s economic, educational, and social welfare rights. Dominant discourse also ignored socio-economic disparities or leveraged them in ways to promote in-person schooling without mitigations.
How and why this occurred is analyzed from an intersectional perspective, meaning that inequities and injustices resulting from harmful policies are understood as having systemic and historical roots along the lines of race, class, gender, and generational disparities, which are reproduced in and through law, politics, and policy (Crenshaw 1998). An intersectional approach shows that violations of children’s rights to life, health, and safety are occurring through the exploitation and reinforcement of longstanding structural inequities, while creating new ones. Laissez-faire policy regarding childhood education has been driven by politics and power, against scientific consensus and public opinion. Coordinated inauthentic actions, disinformation campaigns, and political violence are considered within the scope of politics and power disfiguring public policy in violation of children’s rights.
The adoption of laissez-faire pandemic policies has occurred through at least three primary means, including (1) minimization or denialism and mythologizing regarding the harms of COVID-19 to children and their network effects; (2) a moral panic of pediatric mental health and academic attrition blamed on mitigation measures; and (3) political prioritization of narrow, short-sighted economic aims that insist upon labor and schooling in unsafe spaces despite the availability of effective mitigations. A policy of no policy during a global public health emergency has created a crisis of children’s rights in which life, health, safety, and education are routinely undermined, with poorer socio-economic outcomes. This requires corrective reframing of pandemic policy to combat disinformation, normalize mitigation of communicable disease, and prioritize children’s rights, needs, and perspectives. This chapter aims to expose violations of human rights through laissez-faire pandemic policy within the larger goals of generating critical awareness of their modus operandi and prevention of further systemic harms.