James Hirsen wrote in an Aug. 31 Newsmax column:
It’s been almost three and a half years since public health officials first urged the locking down of America in order to prevent the spread of a virus.
As talk of a possible repeat scenario grows louder, it might be prudent to stop and reflect on what we have gone through psychologically, socially, and emotionally, particularly our children.
When lockdowns were implemented, some prominent professionals questioned the policy.
For doing so, they were maligned and sometimes even censored.
Dr. Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), Dr. Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford) are three highly qualified epidemiologists, who at a pivotal point in history came together to publish a document.
The document, titled the “Great Barrington Declaration,” made the case that lockdowns have a deleterious effect upon children.
Additionally, an argument was made that denying children the opportunity to attend school was particularly harmful.
The scholars were subsequently disparaged by public officials and certain media figures, as if there were an effort in place to avoid open debate of the document’s content.
But Hirsen is dishonestly hiding the full contents of the document, nor did he offer any evidence that Bhattacharya and the other signatories were criticized solely because of the document discussing how COVID lockdowns might affect children. In fact, the key statement of the Great Barrington Declaration is that COVID should be allowed to spread to develop “herd immunity” — a dangerous proposition at a time when the virus was still killing many people daily, vaccines had not yet been developed, and it was unclear that herd immunity would even work (and it doesn’t, given the need for regular vaccinations).
Rather than discuss that crucial aspect of the declaration — which, arguably, what was most criticized — Hirsen chose to narrowly focus on the effects on children and praised the signatories as heroes for being proven right on that (despite, again, offering no evidence that anyone criticized that aspect ofthe declartion):
In retrospect, the doctors and other professionals who were disparaged and/or censored were accurate in their assessments of the negative effects of lockdowns on school-aged children.
Millions of young people could have been spared the negative psychological, social, and emotional ramifications of the lockdowns.
Heaven forbid that we have a repeat of this history.
Then again, Hirsen defended far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for ranting that a proposed COVID passport would be a “mark of the beast,” so maybe he’s not the person anyone should look to for cogent commentary on COVID-related issues.