Sunday, Fox News Channel’s Steve Hilton opened his “The Next Revolution” program with a call for policymakers to reopen schools. which he said was a needed part of the recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
Hilton pointed to other nations, which have already begun opening their schools up, and argued there were consequences from a prolonged shutdown of the school system
“Get on with it and reopen schools now before you do even more needless damage,” Hilton said.
Partial transcript as follows:
HILTON: There won’t be a recovery unless we reopen schools now. If children can’t go to school, parents can’t go to work. We’re told schools must be closed to keep kids safe, but they’re not in danger. According to CDC data, children under 18 make up only two percent of cases and 0.6 percent of hospitalizations, children under 14 make up just 0.02 percent of deaths. Now, the media misinformation machine is fear-mongering about a new mystery disease that affects children. Dr. Fauci cited this when pushing back on Rand Paul’s demand to reopen schools this year. But we’re talking about a handful of cases which are almost always treatable. How offensive to try and frighten parents about the safety of their children?
A more serious argument for school closures is that while children may not get sick themselves, they can infect others. Do they? We are constantly told to follow the science and the data, well, here it is. One study found, quote, “Even if children do get infected, they are less likely to transmit the disease to others than adults. We have not found a single instance of a child infecting parents.” They lecture us about contact tracing while they did it for a boy with coronavirus. They found that even though he came into contact with 172 classmates and teachers while symptomatic, he didn’t transmit the disease to any of them, not one out of 172 people.
In Switzerland, the country’s head of infectious disease says scientists, quote, ” … now no young children don’t transmit the virus.” And because of all of this, France, Israel, Germany, Greece, Portugal, South Korea and many other countries have already begun letting their children back into schools. Two weeks after Denmark reopened their schools, a scientist in the Department of Infectious Diseases at Aarhus University said, “There are no signs whatsoever that the partial reopening has caused the biggest spread of infection.” Yet still, the schools here are closed, even in states where bars and restaurants are reopening. Where in all of this is our own CDC, by the way? Why do we have to rely on scientists from Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland?
Yet another reason for the bungler in chief, useless Dr. Robert Redfield to go. Meanwhile, the mental health toll on children grows by the day, as does the loss of learning — all of it hurting the poorest areas most, especially those in remote parts of the country, with unreliable internet and the poorest families. Any leader anywhere in America who is not planning to reopen schools now, not in the next few months, not in the fall, but now is a data denier and a science denier. Get on with it and reopen schools now before you do even more needless damage.
But once we reopen schools and businesses, we can’t have stupid regulations stifling the recovery. Masks, fine. But what’s this unscientific nonsense about compulsory temperature checks? Totally pointless. You’ll miss most people with coronavirus and catch many who don’t have it. These completely arbitrary social distancing rules, 25 percent occupancy, 33 percent, 50 percent. What’s it even based on? Only one or two people allowed in an elevator at one time? Good luck trying to reopen New York like that, or any downtown business district frankly.
This over-prescriptive regulation is typical of the infantilizing mindset of our technocratic ruling elite. If you boss people around with arbitrary rules, they’ll resist, but ask people to behave responsibly with commonsense, and they will.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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