Children’s Eyesight Worsened Twice as Fast During COVID Lockdowns

The rate of myopia progression among Chicago-area kids more than doubled during the COVID-19 lockdowns when compared to the same kids during the year before the lockdowns, according to a new peer-reviewed study.

Myopia, or nearsightedness, is growing more common among children, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology. Though estimates vary, nearly half of the world’s population is expected to have myopia by 2050.

The study authors — who published their findings on Nov. 18 in the British Journal of Ophthalmology — looked at eye exam results of 2,064 Chicago-area kids ages 2-17 from January 2019 through March 2021.

They compared the differences in exam results from 2019 to 2020 — before the COVID-19 lockdowns — with the differences in exam results from 2020 to 2021 when COVID-19 lockdowns were in effect.

Through statistical analyses, they found “a substantial worsening” of myopia progression “during the period of home confinement and online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Specifically, the change in myopia progression rates from 2020 to 2021 was more than double (2.2 times greater) the change from 2019 to 2020.

“The greatest increase in myopia prevalence was seen in younger elementary school-aged children, particularly in 8-year-olds, and also in 17-year-olds,” they said.

The authors said their findings align with prior research showing that kids who spend lots of time indoors reading and looking at screens tend to have worsening eyesight. They also cited prior research showing that spending time outdoors typically prevents and mitigates myopia.

The researchers concluded that COVID-19 pandemic policies — including school closures and cancellation of outdoor group sports — likely played a role in the uptick in myopia progression.

Online learning methods — and increased screen time and less outdoor time — have persisted despite the end of COVID-19 lockdowns, they said. Their evidence suggests that may be a problem when it comes to kids’ eye health.

The authors of the study called for a reduction in kids’ online learning because of its associated screen time and lack of outdoor activity.

Keep reading

Covid Tyrants Partied While Demanding Lockdowns for Everyone Else

Remember when government officials sanctioned orgies but insisted it was too risky to permit children to attend classes to learn how to read?

During the pandemic, New York City Covid Czar Jay Varma championed endless government restrictions and lockdowns to keep people safe. But, at the same time, he attended sex parties and a dance party, indulgences that made a mockery of everything he preached to New Yorkers. 

His hypocrisy was exposed this week by undercover recordings made by conservative podcaster Steven Crowder. Varma declared on Thursday: “I take responsibility for not using the best judgment at the time.”

That statement is a great consolation to everyone whose rights and liberties were nullified during the pandemic. In the undercover recordings, Varma bragged about brutalizing people into submission:

  • “I’m gonna make it really fu*king hard to be unvaccinated.”
  • “I actually was the one who convinced the Mayor to make it a mandate[vaccine].”
  • “You can’t get a job, you can’t go to a restaurant, your kids can’t go to school…it’s like fu*k it, I’m just going to get vaccinated.”

Varma’s takedown should spur a re-examination of how idiotic and oppressive governments became during the pandemic. Politicians and petty czars canceled Thanksgivings and other holidays across the nation. In lieu of family gatherings, they offered endless idiotic advice for “safe sex” during Covid.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo denounced anyone who disobeyed his edicts, including condemning sheriffs as “dictators” for refusing to enforce his mask mandate inside people’s homes. But other officials in New York give their blessings to behavior which was reckless even by “woke” standards. The New York City Health Department recommended that people who organize orgies, “If you do attend (sex orgies), follow COVID-19 precautions. ” The guidance hinted that nothing was better than a rooftop: “Pick larger, more open, and well-ventilated spaces.”

Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, New York City’s deputy health commissioner, boasted, “Our health department has a really strong record of being very sex positive.” At the same time that New York cops violently assaulted people for not wearing face masks, the city government officially sanctioned “glory holes.” The Big Apple’s health department urged people to “be creative with… physical barriers, like walls, that allow sexual contact while preventing close face-to-face contact.” That salacious advice was not included in Gov. Cuomo’s self-tribute bestseller, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Instead of meeting sex partners online, city Health Department recommended, “Video dates, sexting, subscription-based fan platforms, sexy ‘Zoom parties’ or chat rooms may be options for you.” So maybe invite Jeffrey Toobin to your Zoom party? (Toobin was fired after masturbating during a New Yorker Zoom call.) Many of the “chat rooms” that bureaucrats recommended were stocked with jailbait, police and FBI agents masquerading and looking to entrap people for underage sex or other offenses. Maybe someone should ask Jeff Bezos about the alleged emailed pictures of his anatomy?

Keep reading

Karma For Varma! NYC Covid Czar Busted For Secret Drug/Sex Parties During Lockdown

Maybe he should change his name to Varmint.

Dr. Jay Varma, the Covid czar under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, has been caught bragging about his double standard personal life. The champion of draconian measures during Covid attended drug-fueled sex parties while the rest of the city sheltered in place.

As reported by the New York Post, Varma didn’t spare the details:

“We went to some, like, underground dance party … underneath a bank on Wall Street … We were all rolling, we’re all taking molly [MDMA] and everybody’s high. And I was so happy because I hadn’t done that in like a year and a half,” he said in the clip.

The footage was first leaked by Steven Crowder, a right-wing internet personality on Thursday. In a followup video Crowder later confronted Varma at a restaurant with his own damning quotes. Varma defended himself by saying he was “babbling in what I thought was a date with somebody.”

“My wife and I have an open relationship,” he quickly added.

Further, Varma threw his old boss under the bus while being videoed by a woman pretending to be on a date with Varma on August 14th. The Project Veritas-style ambush went live today on Steven Crowder’s YouTube channel. Varma claimed that he wanted to keep schools open, but “weenie” de Blasio caved to teacher’s unions.

Keep reading

Covid Lockdown Accelerated Aging of Teen Brains — Study

study published Monday documented how the Covid lockdowns triggered an accelerated rate of brain aging in teens, particularly in female teens.

“We report that the lockdown measures enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in unusually accelerated brain maturation in adolescents and that this accelerated maturation was much more pronounced in females than in males,” the study said in the ‘Significance’ section.

Perhaps not surprisingly, lockdowns, which inhibited social interaction, had a greater effect on females, as anyone who’s been around humans knows females are the more social gender, making them more vulnerable to social upheaval.

“These findings indicate greater vulnerability of the female brain, as compared to the male brain, to the lifestyle changes resulting from the pandemic lockdowns,” the study said in the ‘Significance’ section.

The research showed that the lockdowns served as an interesting, albeit malicious, neuropsychological experiment on the developing human brain.

“They additionally provide a potential neurophysiological mechanism for alterations in adolescent mental health and other behaviors associated with the lockdowns,” the study said in the ‘Significance’ section.

While ‘maturity’ is widely regarded as a positive aspect of the aging process, it should be noted that the ‘maturation’ term used in the scientific research is not a positive attribute.

Keep reading

What’s going to be the ‘thing’ that the globalists and bankers use to try to impose ‘lockdowns’ next?

It seems clear that the globalists and bankers (from hereon to be referred to as non-elites) will soon be imposing their “pandemic preparedness” schemes on the public again. Having pushed that ‘virus epidemic’ “pandemic” envelope a little too far the last time around, what would they possibly be able to dangle like that proverbial carrot in front of our faces that would be effective as a tool to convince us that we need to be locked up again?

Think: war and more precisely, civil wars. It seems very clear from the chaos and madness happening in the UK and Ireland right now that the illegal immigrant male youths ‘residing’ all over the cities and countryside are very much meant to be there for a planned retaliation against culture. Sorry, I see what I see. Prove me wrong.

All they need is a signal. This could comprise many things: fooling the people into burning actual refugee refuges, incitement from a public figure, or a few children potentially being ear-marked for rape or murder.

Keep reading

British Government Advisor Calls for Lockdowns To Tackle Unrest

An advisor to Britain’s Labour government has suggested using COVID-style lockdowns to tackle growing unrest, as protestors clash with police and counter-protestors across the UK after the murder of three young girls at a dance class.

John Woodcock, Baron Walney, a former MP and the UK government’s advisor on political violence and disruption, told Times Radio that the government should be prepared to implement lockdown measures to tackle unrest.

He said the British public will back measures they “feel are necessary to get this situation under control.”

“I think the government and new ministers will understand the British public will back them in whatever measures they feel is necessary to get this situation under control.

“Hopefully we can see this petering out now over the next few days and the extra effort which is being put on forces being able to have effect.

“But if that isn’t the case, I think the British public will back further action from ministers in this emergency to get things under control.

“Back in Covid, they were prepared to back measures that were needed in that situation and I think they would take a similar approach to keeping rioters off the streets now given the scale of damage that has been done to communities.”

Tensions across the UK remain extremely high after the murder of three schoolgirls by Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, the son of a Rwandan immigrant, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport.

Keep reading

US government tanked the economy with covid lockdowns to gain control over the population through data collection and enforcement

The covid lockdowns amounted to the world’s largest and most elaborate economic head-fake in human history.

It left the entire world less free and less prosperous, and with drained hopes that restoring normality can happen anytime soon. To add injury to the insult, most official institutions are manufacturing fake data to cover it all up.

In the following, Jeffrey Tucker explains the economic impact on the USA of the lockdown in March 2020 and its aftermath. He highlights that the labour market has not fully recovered, stimulus was eroded by inflation, retail sales and factory orders have not significantly increased, and output has not seen a substantial rise. Additionally, it questions the accuracy of inflation data and the sustainability of the economic recovery.

Why did they shut economies down? A major ambition of the covid response was the creation of a universal vaccine passport, he writes. “All these efforts were reversed but the plan itself revealed the larger agenda: control through data collection and enforcement.  The ambition is not gone and will likely come back but a better and more comprehensive path is the Central Bank Digital Currency.”

Keep reading

Bombshell DHS Document Proves Pandemic Lockdowns Planned In 2007

We’ve just come across a document hosted by the Department of Homeland Security, posted March 2023, but written in 2007, that amounts to a full-blown corporatist imposition on the US, abolishing anything remotely resembling the Bill of Rights and Constitutional law. It is right there in plain sight for anyone curious enough to dig.

There is nothing in it that you haven’t already experienced with lockdowns. What makes it interesting are the participants in the forging of the plan, which is pretty much the whole of corporate America as it stood in 2007. It was a George W. Bush initiative. The conclusions are startling.

“Quarantine is a legally enforceable declaration that a government body may institute over individuals potentially exposed to a disease, but who are not symptomatic. If enacted, Federal quarantine laws will be coordinated between CDC and State and local public health officials, and, if necessary, law enforcement personnel…The government may also enact travel restrictions to limit the movement of people and products between geographic areas in an effort to limit disease transmission and spread. Authorities are currently reviewing possible plans to curtail international travel upon a pandemic’s emergence overseas.

“Limiting public assembly opportunities also helps limit the spread of disease. Concert halls, movie theaters, sports arenas, shopping malls, and other large public gathering places might close indefinitely during a pandemic—whether because of voluntary closures or government-imposed closures. Similarly, officials may close schools and non-essential businesses during pandemic waves in an effort to significantly slow disease transmission rates. These strategies aim to prevent the close interaction of individuals, the primary conduit of spreading the influenza virus. Even taking steps such as limiting person-to-person interactions within a distance of three feet or avoiding instances of casual close contact, such as shaking hands, will help limit disease spread.”

There we have it: the pandemic plans. They once seemed abstract. In 2020, they became very real. Your rights were deleted. No more freedom even to have house guests. In those days, the rule was to enforce only three feet of distance rather than six feet of distance, neither of which had any basis in science. Indeed, the actual scientific literature even at that time recommended against any physical interventions designed to limit the spread of respiratory viruses. They were known not to work. The entire profession of public health accepted that.

Keep reading

Those Who Brought Us Lockdown Are Unrepentant

Readers of the Daily Sceptic may be interested to listen to yesterday’s UnHerd roundtable discussion conducted with Lee Cain (former Director of Communications at 10 Downing Street and a leading member of Boris Johnson’s ‘brain trust’). It is, as academics say, a ‘rich text’, with an awful lot in it to digest. But what really fascinated me about it – and what has really fascinated me about all of the General Election coverage so far – is the shoe that simply hasn’t dropped: namely, the biggest public policy decision since the Second World War, which was the 2020 lockdown.

Cain provides a very interesting diagnosis of what has gone wrong for the Tories since 2019. But it is only two thirds of the way into the conversation that the subject of Covid comes up. And it is discussed almost in isolation as though it took place in a never-never land – as though, indeed, it doesn’t touch upon almost every single thorny issue in which the Government now finds itself entangled: inflation, public borrowing, a self-entitled and unproductive civil service, NHS waiting lists, declining public order and civility, a backlog of criminal cases, excess deaths, huge increases in school truancy and behavioural problems in schools, and so on and so on.

It is almost as though spunking up to £410 billion of public money, deliberately stoking irrational fears amongst the populace, closing schools and universities for almost a year off and on, and telling people not to go to hospital for months on end was a series of actions that were always going to be consequence-free – a no-brainer that was just going to provide a sugar-rush of good opinion polling followed by a happy period of ‘building back better’. And it is painfully evident, listening to the Cain interview, that he remains stuck in that mindset, insisting that failing to have a lockdown in March 2020 would have been “against all the scientific evidence” and even doubling down on the insanity by suggesting that the main problem of Covid policy was trying to open up too quickly in the summer of that year.

Keep reading

Up to Half of Excess Deaths in U.S. Nursing Homes Were Due to Lockdowns and Mitigation Measures

Up to half the excess deaths in American nursing homes were due to the impact of lockdowns and mitigation measures on frail residents rather than the virus. That’s the conclusion of epidemiologist Professor Eyal Shahar in a new analysis of a study on U.S. nursing home deaths.

The study, published in the Journal of Health Economics in 2022, found that the greater the mitigation efforts in U.S. nursing homes, the higher the death toll during the pandemic. “Those efforts not only largely failed to reduce Covid mortality, but they also added non-Covid deaths. The more they tried to mitigate, the worse the outcome was,” notes Prof. Shahar.

“These results are consistent in three consecutive periods: May through September 2020, September through December 2020, and December 2020 through April 2021. Moreover, the relationship between quality ranking and mortality became stronger over time,” he adds.

The reason was the non-Covid death toll: “The higher the ranking, the higher the number of non-Covid deaths”.

While in the first wave the harsh mitigation measures do appear to have reduced Covid deaths somewhat, this effect was “insufficient” to make-up for the non-Covid deaths associated with a higher ranking. It was also not true for later waves.

Keep reading