IN response to the immaculately-timed washing up of Omicron on our shores – four weeks before Christmas – Covid-19 policies for schools Schools Covid-19 Operational Guidance’ have been ‘updated’.
The Department for Education, in collaboration with the Department of Health and Social Care and the UK Health Security Agency, moronically and hypocritically states that ‘Covid-19 continues to be a virus that we learn to live with and the imperative to reduce the disruption to children and young people’s education remains’.
Thus post-contact-tracing self-isolation and PCR testing has returned for any child suspected to have been exposed to the Omicron variant only (a rule applicable also to early years settings). It leaves one wondering just how the Government intends to uphold its pledge to eradicate educational disruption should Omicron spread rapidly and perhaps even become the temporary dominant strain.
If this does happen, thousands of children yet again face another winter, and perhaps a spring, of repeated stints at home in isolation, their parents having to take time off work.
Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty, who green-lit the vaccination of children in defence of their schooling, would then be forced to eat his words – as even those who have already had the jab are not to be permitted to bypass the updated Omnicron test and trace protocol.
I suspect though, that he wouldn’t swallow his hypocrisy. Instead he’d use the cover of Omicron to regurgitate his blessing to the jabbing of the next cohort down – five to 11-year-olds.
Face masks have also returned for those in Year Seven and above, to be worn in all areas outside the classroom. Yet on the very evening of the Omicron announcement, with breathtaking lack of awareness, Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi was spotted maskless at the annual Teaching Awards amid a sea of other bare faces.
Just how is it that Zahawi, having ‘fled’ his native country, Iraq, to escape Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical rule, managed to then install himself as a tyrant in the British government?
There is also a discrepancy in the updated school guidance which exemplifies the new trend among government departments to cherry-pick or redact scientific data to help sustain the public health emergency narrative.
When Whitty overruled the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation vis-a-vis the vaccination of 12 to 15-year-olds, Public Health England nonetheless clearly identified in its Green Book that under-16s were at low risk from Covid and ‘not recommended for vaccination’.
Doubtless in order to help quell any opposition to the rollout, that statement was removed in the next Green Book update.
Yet it pops back again in the Schools Covid-19 Operational Guidance, minus any mention of vaccination, but with the addition of: ‘The UK Clinical Review Panel has recommended that no children and young people under the age of 18 should be considered CEV (clinically extremely vulnerable) and under-18s should be removed from the Shielded Patient List.’
Adhering to Government logic, if Omicron warrants the reintroduction of controls in schools, surely these youngsters should be placed back on the Shielded Patient List?
This just goes to show how the State, via a little light editing, can now reclassify with impunity the health status of an entire demographic to achieve its political aims (health passports, anyone?).
Twenty months into this shamdemic, still very little makes sense. Prime Minister, in light of what you claim is a successful vaccine rollout, do clinically extremely vulnerable people, as they relate to Covid-19, still exist? If so, are we to shield them again in the event of Omicron’s rapid spread, or do they hop on and off the ‘list’ to suit your manufactured climate of public opinion?
If indeed we are to shield them, then should there be a repeat of last winter’s pingdemic debacle, will vulnerable under-18s be put back on the ‘list’, or have they been permanently reclassified, despite the vaccine’s inability to block transmission or infection?
Or are the Department for Education, the DHSC, the UKHSA, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency – Pfizer, Tesco, John down the pub, the NHS, and St Bigglesworth Community College – all permitted a different stance on the small matter of juvenile clinical vulnerability during this most lethal public health crisis of all time of yours?
Prime Minister, children already have enough on their plate as it is, trying to navigate the lunatic culture of 21st century Britain. That you must also cruelly subject them once again to the moronic whims of your public health lackeys, so as to pander to pandemic gang leaders far higher up the chain of command than yourself, is testament to your cowardice, not your leadership.
