The Highwire with Del Bigtree - LOCKDOWN’S LASTING EFFECTS

Episode Date: July 7, 2022

As we move past the COVID era, the devastating effects of lockdowns are becoming apparent, from the current mental health crisis, to substance abuse spikes and developmental delays in infants.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

This is about empathy. This is about understanding. We're going to lay out some information here. And just keep that in mind, you know, we are on the other side of this pandemic and we do have challenges. And this is where we're going to go. But before we get into the most recent data, we continually have to caveat this data with appropriately the Great Barrington Declaration. Ahead of their time, October 2020, these epidemiologists, three well-sighted epidemiologists saw the way the lockdowns were going, saw what they were going to do. do and knew the data that was going to come from this. And they penned this warning, the declaration that's been signed upon by tens of thousands of doctors now. And this is what they wrote. This was in the declaration at that time before we knew all of this. They said, as infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists, we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and

mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, that's across the population. But then they went even further. They said current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long term public health with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. They went so far to say keeping students out of schools a grave injustice. Unfortunately, their warnings were not heated. So this is what the headlines look like. Before we get in really deep into this segment, just again, just to frame this in case anybody forgot in 2020, these are the headlines.

48 states have ordered or recommended that schools don't reopen this academic year. And Florida and Texas were on this. So don't think that these kind of luminary states that we look at is liberal. Beacons now back then they were in you know lockstep with some of this oh look geoffrey we were in the middle of it right here you know we had defected five families defected from the waldorf private school we were at and you know the you know just thinking about the waldorf curriculum and rudolph steiner who made some of the earliest statements about the future dangers of vaccinations and to think that that school was masking and going pro vaccine but even here in texas we defected with a bunch of families and

started our own homeschool co-op just to make our way through, you know, that lockdown on our children. So though I'm very, very lucky and I want to give a shout out to my wife who worked so hard while I was on the show making sure that that school and bringing in the teachers and making that happen were possible. But it was people that sort of went that extra step that kept their kids from having to go through, you know, this real torture. But so many, I know just didn't have the time or weren't able to. able to really put that focus trying to just make ends meet. So so many fell through the cracks all across this country.

And even here in Liberty Beacons like Texas, you're absolutely right. Right. And let's be clear and honest, they were scary times. But looking at this data we're presenting right now, there were outlets and individuals that amplified and leveraged that fear for specific policies that did cause harm and the new were gonna cause harm.

So let's look at the Atlantic magazine. This was in August, on August 2nd, 2020, going into the fall school year. Schools were, you know, deciding were going to open or not. This is the headline. This push to open schools is guaranteed to fail. I mean, clear fearmongering from who? This is in the quotes, this push to open schools is guaranteed to fail, says Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and molecular biologists.

He says in communities with high transmission, it's inevitable that COVID-19 will enter the schools. Within two weeks of opening schools and communities with high virus transmission, teachers will become ill. All it will take is for a single teacher to become hospitalized with COVID and everything will shut down. He goes on to say, we don't need additional information to make decisions. Otez insisted right now, he said, there are at least 40 states from which schools simply should not open. Remember, schools are not hermetically sealed. We need to reach containment first. It's that simple.

Well, that's dead wrong, as we know now. It's not that simple. No, Peter, it's not that simple. Yeah, well done. Destroyed our children's lives and did nothing. to stop the pandemic, the transmission, or anything else, fail. Okay. On record as a fear as a fear monger.

But perhaps one of the gravest injustices to use the Great Barrington Declaration language was the Teachers Union. This was the American Federation of Teachers. This was the headline in the New York Post. Powerful Teachers Unit influenced CDC on school reopenings. This was in February 2021. All the schools were expected to reopen.

And this teacher's union not only lobby the CDC, but suggested language in a flurry of emails before this school reopening. And what that caused was a slow walk opening, like a slow motion opening. Instead of opening them all, they slow lock this return to in-person learning, knowing that these damages are already mounting. They were doing it to protect what there was been called the laptop class, the teachers, using these, and we go over the UK, we're going to switch back and forth between the US and the UK.

And laptop class, by the way, just being those that could afford to have computers at home, You know, that group that had kids that were affluent enough to have all the bells and whistles and to make that learning experience okay. Forget about those kids, single parent home, mom's off to work or dad's off to work. They're alone. No computer. No way to do any of this. This was an absolute destruction of those less affluent classes here in America. And from the same very people that teachers and all that always say, oh, we care about these kids.

School lunches disappeared sometimes. They're only meals. I mean, I'm sure you're going to get into all that. But yeah, the laptop class may have survived. But what about those that need our help and need that schooling? And the teachers just didn't seem to care. Right. And in the COVID-19, we'll call it the pandemic response. We really saw government max leverage fear. And this is now a public health tool. It's always been kind of a subtle stick in the background, pushing and prodding people. It maximized it. And in the UK, we had a group. called the scientific pandemic influenza group on behavior. So they were brought in to give the MPs there and the government kind of ideas on how to exacerbate these lockdowns, make them, make people scared of the virus and be able to stay in their homes. And this was the headline. They turned whistleblower because they saw how badly it was used.

Use of fear to control behavior in COVID crisis was totalitarian amid scientists. These are the whistleblowers. They wrote a book. This was the quotes in the article. In March 2020, the government was very worried about compliance, and they thought people wouldn't want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian. They say the use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable.

It's been like a weird experiment, ultimately it backfired because people became more scared. And what does fear do in a situation like this? It leads to all the things that we're going to go into, alcohol abuse, overdose and opioids. But let's look at the main architect here. It was in the montage at the beginning. We have Anthony Fauci, and he has come out. These are recent headlines. He's one of the main architects pushing these restrictions.

Fauci says we may never know of costs of COVID lockdowns outweigh benefits. Here he is just sliding out the back door. Fauci again, it may never be clear whether lockdowns were worth it or too severe. So what we have to say to that is there's an article. This is an opinion piece by the Hart Group. This is a UK group. Now, the therapists are speaking out in mass, which is great. This is Sarah Waters.

She wrote this. She's a psychotherapist, specializes in the effects of abuse and childhood trauma and family dynamics. She says, was the emotional health of future generations sacrificed on the COVID altar? She writes, it is not too late to make sure these policies are never inflicted upon our children again. Using the young as human shields to protect the adults in this way is abusive and unscientific. It must never be repeated. Now, it's unbelievable. I mean, it's like the Titanic scene.

where they kick the kids out of the lifeboats that throw themselves in, we literally saw something we never expected where we used the children to try and protect the elderly instead of vice versa. Just really horrific, sad, embarrassing display of humanity or inhumanity. It absolutely is. And again, like you said, this is going to call upon just titanic empathy on humanity's part now. It's going to call forward this. And let's go into the effects and again these are some of the recent effects um some of the some of these articles and the headlines are very recent and this is ongoing so we're just putting this out there for a public record but let's start with the kids the infants and the children the toddlers children born this is

the headline here children born during pandemic have lower iqs u.s study finds and this is the IQ study it says impact of the covid 19 pandemic and early childhood cognitive development initial findings and a longitudinal observational study of child health and they said leveraging a large ongoing longitudinal study of child development, we examined general childhood cognitive scores in 2020 and 2021 versus the preceding decade. They had that much data going back, 2011 to 2019. We find that children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal motor and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic. And this is a image that was built during an article with that with their data. You can see here. There's the composite scores on early learning tests on the

left side there. In 2011, they were hovering around 100. It says here they should be around 115 to 85. We see in 2019, they just plummeted. We're looking at almost 75 here for these kids, for these infants and babies three months to three years. And it goes on from here. Now, this is an article from May that, again, UK, we're going to toggle back there. COVID lockdowns left toddlers unable to speak or play properly. This is the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists. They say that one in three language therapists, say referrals doubled since the pandemic. Wow.

And in the New York hospitals, we'll go to New York here. In a large children's New York hospital, there was an ongoing study as well before the pandemic since 2017. The pandemic hits had this large cohort of information on children's development that they could really compare and contrast. And this was the headline here. Pandemic is stunting babies development due to stress on mothers. Now, this is interesting because we'll read the quote and then we'll talk about this.

No difference were, differences were found in scores between infants exposed to the virus in the womb and those whose mothers did not contract it. But average scores and social motor skills were lower than 62 pre-pendemic infants born at the same hospitals. So, you know, a lot of people say, well, it's the virus. It's COVID. Well, this is a direct impact of the stress on the mothers showing impact on the babies. This is a very valuable study. And for anybody out there that wants to look at this study, it was published in JAMA, Journal of American Medicine. Association of birth during the COVID-19 pandemic with neurodevelopmental status at six months in-in-in-uniform exposure to maternal SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Now, again, it goes back to 2017, and this is what they write when they look at this information compared with the historical cohort infants born during the pandemic had significantly lower scores on gross motor, fine motor, and personal social subdomains in fully adjusted models. They use something called Ages and Stages questionnaire to do this for these children, they had the parents fill this out. But going beyond that, going beyond the developmental for infants, we even see an increase in weight gain. And, you know, obviously people have reported this. Maybe people personally out there listening go, yeah, yeah, I had a couple extra burgers or whatever. But the CDC's data, even the CDC's data can find some really interesting nugget sometimes.

This is what they reported. It's the longitudinal trends in body mass index as BMI before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, among. person aged 2 to 19 years in the US. So they write among a cohort of 432,302 persons age 2 to 19 years, the rate of body mass index, BMI increase approximately doubled during the pandemic compared to the pre-pandemic period, doubled. And then it says here, persons with pre-pandemic overweight or obesity and younger school-age children experience the largest increases. So those people that were at risk already that were overweight already or had a high BMI, they were just hit down even harder and understand this BMI is an indicator of future health risks BMI is an indicator of future

morbidity and death this is this is a big deal so we saddled the two to 19 year olds with with this kind of millstone of obviously future health risks and so again infants and children now the older kids and teenagers this is really where the red flashing light is in this you know as we're talking about this so this is in the UK this is just a recent headline. pandemic drove 60,000 more secondary school children into clinical depression. This was the U.S. CDC, a cry for help. CDC warns of a steep decline in teen mental health. They said in their report, one in five of the kids that they surveyed said they had suicidal thoughts, four and 10 teens that they felt persistently sad or hopeless. This all led, you know, if we remember, just a quick

flashback in late October 2021, this led the leading groups to call a national emergency. So in the middle of the pandemic, they calling it a crisis within a crisis. This was the headline here. Pediatricians say the mental health crisis among kids has become a national emergency. And it still is. It hasn't gotten any better. And this was from, it says here, the declaration was penned by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Children's Hospital Association, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, which together represent more than 77,000 physicians and 200 children's hospitals. And why did they do this? Well, they were seeing the referrals. They were seeing, they were hearing from the,

the pediatricians saying, look, we are swamped. And they were seeing the hospitals before we see headlines like this. They heard about it behind the scenes. This is in the UK, the NHS. This was in April 2022. This is the headline. Swamped NHS mental health services turning away children, says GPs, listen to this. 95% of GPs, those are general practitioners, say that CAMHS, as their counseling

and mental health services are either in crisis, 46% or very inadequate, 49%. Half say that at least six in 10 referrals they make for anxiety, depression, conduct disorder, and self-harm are routinely rejected because the young people's symptoms are deemed not severe enough, even though they only refer the most at-risk cases. If your jaws are on the ground, people, they should be. Then it goes on to say one in four say that 60 to 100 percent of referrals for eating disorders and addictions are rejected. And the same is happening here in the United States. This is an article from May 24th of this year, just less than a month ago. go. Pandemic has U.S. hospitals overwhelmed with teen mental health crisis. Now, let's take a breath there because we're going through kind of the litany of all the age groups and what this is, what's

happening really out there in your communities. So let's look at the adults. Now, this is something, I know a lot of people that watch this show, including myself, we have people in the communities or family members that have experienced situations like this. This is the headline here. This is out a Baton Rouge. Pandemic wiped out many recovery resources for addicts. Overdoses nearly doubled in EBR parish. So there's a recent poll and they looked at the drinking during the pandemic and even after the pandemic and it says Americans are using alcohol to cope with pandemic stress. Nearly one in five report heavy drinking and I want to bring back a study we looked at about two months ago and this was the alcohol related mortality. This is a very important study because it ties into a

story we're going to cover in just a moment. Evaluation of trends in alcohol use disorder related mortality in the U.S. before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors say in this cross-sectional study, we used data from 2012 to 2019 to project 2020 and 2021 mortality rates and found that alcohol use disorder related mortality rates increased among all ages and sexes during the pandemic. I mean, that's, you know, we knew kind of that was going to happen, but this is the kicker in this study. The youngest age group, 25 to 44 years, demonstrated the largest increase in alcohol disorder mortality 40.47% in 2020 and 33.95% in 2021 across all age groups. And you can see the chart here. It just kind of exponentially rises there in 2020 and 2021. And again, we're going to

cover this, but there's the insurance deaths. We're seeing a lot of information about the insurance companies and the death rate spiking in those exact age groups. And people are saying, well, is the vaccine? Is it how the hospitals are treating these kids when they go in? Well, this could be another explanation for that or it could be all of those things combined but one of the biggest things here in the u.s and this is a story we've covered uh you and i have covered together for probably five years back and forth because it's been bouncing in the headlines but the opioid crisis first it was perdu pharma with with their how they started that then the fentanyl came in and so that was a perfect storm for when covid hit so we have this is with the cdc data shows these are the headlines just recently

again u.s overdose deaths hit record 107000 last year cdcdc says, and that's the most recent data. It says experts say the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the problem, has lockdowns and other restrictions, isolated those with drug addictions and made treatment harder to get. Again, we knew that. But look at this. So I started to do some research, and I was looking at the states with the most restrictions, the strongest lockdowns, the most restrictions on their people. And I thought it would be interesting and it would be kind of, I guess, intuitive to know that are the states with the most restrictions, the ones that are showing higher rates of overdoses, and this is what I found. So this is a table here. These are the states with the

fewest coronavirus restrictions. It's one through 51. So this is the bottom of that table. These are the ones that are most restrictive. We have Vermont, we have D.C., Virginia, Washington, New York, California, kind of rounding those up. So I looked at the headlines of these overdoses, all this new CDC data, the most recent data. Here's what I found. Now, Vermont's the worst, according to this data. So here's the headline vermont leads u.s. in pandemic overdose rate death rate uh again dc in washington on that list as well here's the headline overdose deaths in virginia and dc were up more than 40% in 2020 virginia's on the list too california's on that list let's look at how they're doing los angeles hits a high for drug overdose deaths here is the chart from that and you can see here 2020 and

2021 just absolutely skyrocketing 2019 to starting to go up but those two years. New York on that list as well. Here's the headline New York saw record overdose deaths in 2020 health officials say and then the WHO switching over now. COVID-19 pandemic triggers 25% increase in prevalence of anxiety and depression worldwide. These are adults as well. And we have a first look out of Israel. So now, you know, as we're sitting here, people are saying, well, that was then, you know, clearly this, you know, that was a terrible time. We're going to heal and we're going to help people. But out of Israel, there's a first look study showing what's called post-pandemic or post-lockdown

depression. So as these restrictions are lifted, how fast, how well do people go back to their routine lives? So here's the headline, or the study title, if anyone else look this up, post-lockdown depression, adaption difficulties, depressive symptoms, and the role of positive solitude will return to routine after the lifting of nationwide COVID-19 social restriction. They looked at middle age and older adults, and it said this. About half of the responders reported moderate to high levels of return to routine

adaption difficulties. These difficulties were positively correlated with depressive symptoms. So clearly, again, even if people are fine, getting back into your normal routine is not as easy as just a snap of your fingers. This is going to take a global effort and an effort in communities and families to really nurture the health of humanity back after what we just went through of these restrictions. Well, and I can't help but think when you look at the size of these numbers that probably all of us have family members that probably slid into some of these issues, they're not going to tell us, right? These aren't the types of things that you just come around and say, oh, by the way, I developed a real addiction problem over the last two years. They're going to be hiding it. So I think we've got to be really sensitive to the fact that some of these family members we haven't seen for a while, maybe really dealing with things, and we've got to find ways to sort of listen and be there and maybe help them open up and coming around. around to this because it's not going to be on a billboard over their heads.

This is something, this is the type of life and issues that you hide from everybody. So hopefully everyone will be sensitive to that. You know, I can't help us sit here. We've talked about it before, but when I see just, it's like carnage, carnage of our society, total destruction of the fabric, the torn apart, the fabric that holds us together in this country, and I'm sure felt in every nation around the world. And then I think how you open this up. great Barrington Declaration, world renowned scientists in Dr. Martin Koldorf, Dr.

Sinatra Gupta, and Dr. J. Badacharya that told us they didn't have a crystal ball, but it sure seems like they did. They warned us this is exactly you're going to cause more problems than you're going to alleviate that yes we're infectious disease specialist too but these lockdowns are going to be destructive. We've got to find a better way. They had a better way. They said, let's take care of those. They're in the high-risk categories while letting the rest of us live normal lives so we can hold this whole thing together, not destroy the world as we know. And here's what I've got to say as I sit here, the fact that these three scientists and doctors are still being censored by social media, are still having

difficulty making their way into the mainstream and being respected for having predicted all of the issues that we are having here, and those that attack them, including those in our own regulatory agencies, are still in control of this whole thing. I mean, wouldn't it seem that an intelligent population would say, okay, we went with the group that doubled down and said lockdowns are the only way.

They're going to get inside this pandemic. They never got inside this pandemic. We still have issues that we're talking about in time where new variants may be coming. You know, we're all having to learn to live with it. And you destroyed our children's lives. destroyed the education, you're costing us a fortune. We lost so many to drug and alcohol abuse and addiction,

all the things you just listed. So at what point do we say, get off the throne, you're done. We followed you, you were wrong, the people that were right, let's bring them in and give them jobs leading us forward since they were the ones that showed they knew how to do this. When I think back to the fact that the Great Barretton Declaration, which we celebrated on this show from day one, it was the position that we took on the high wire when

Everyone else in mainstream media went with these jokers that got the whole thing wrong and destroyed the world as we know it. They actually attacked and went after the Great Barrington Declaration. We have proof of that in FOIAID emails of the head of the NIH that did exactly that. There needs to be a quick and devastating takedown. Emails show how Fauci and head of NIH worked to discredit three experts who penned the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for an end to lockdowns. In fact, it was between Francis Collins. his own email head of the NIH, hi Tony and Cliff. This proposal from three fringe epidemiologists,

yeah, Oxford and other high-ranking institutions who met with the secretary seems to be getting a lot of attention. And even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Levitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don't see anything like that online yet. Is it underway? You know what? We need to have a quick and take down.

devastating takedown is these morons that have destroyed our lives. Yes, you, Francis Collins. Yes, you, Anthony Fauci. I'm tired of having to look at these jokers on our television when they destroyed the world. Those that were right, we need to start celebrating them and get them into positions where they get to make better decisions for us going to the future. All right. That's it. I had to just get that off my chest. Thank you, Jeffrey. Let's get back to the rest of what you have to say. Absolutely. Hey, well said, you know, these people would have monuments built to them in any other generation or these three these three epidemiologists