On Tuesday morning, The New York Times’ “Morning Newsletter” said that since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, “Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults” in a piece titled, “No Way to Grow Up.” That is, of course, a true statement. Yet that admission left many conservatives frustrated for having warned of the damage that lockdowns were doing to kids for nearly two years, only to be met with ridicule and dismissive attitudes from leftist media and politicians.
“American children are starting 2022 in crisis,” NYT’s David Leonhardt opined in the newsletter, “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.”
In the newsletter, Leonhardt noted that due to lockdowns and other measures such as out-of-school learning via video calls, “children fell far behind in school during the first year of the pandemic and have not caught up.”
Additionally, the writer stated that mental health problems, adolescent suicide attempts, gun violence, and other behavioral issues amongst children have increased since the end of 2019.
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The widespread availability of vaccines since last spring also raises an ethical question: Should children suffer to protect unvaccinated adults — who are voluntarily accepting Covid risk for themselves and increasing everybody else’s risk, too? Right now, the United States is effectively saying yes.