Lest We Forget — Part 1: They Knew. They Did It Anyway

Governments ignored children’s needs during the Covid era. But they locked down the children anyway.

// Children & Education

By Hugh McCarthy - 28th August 2025

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They knew. They did it anyway.

As Aristotle wrote in Politics about the governing of Carthage:

They think the rulers should be chosen … for their wealth … It is a bad thing that the great offices of state, the kingship and the generalship should be for sale. For this makes wealth more honoured than worth and renders the whole state avaricious … and it is probable that those who purchase their office will learn by degrees to make a profit out of it.

The purpose of this four-part series is to present the evidence of what has been done to our children as a compendium to remind people of the damage inflicted on a generation and for which no one has been held accountable. The article weaves evidence provided at the time set against up-to-date research evidence to show how early material has stood the test of time. It also serves as a five-year commemorative edition; my first article was published in June 2020.

Professor Carl Heneghan succinctly provided the rationale behind the series in 2022:

We believe that we must record as much as possible of what went on for posterity, hoping that the catastrophic mistakes are not repeated in future. In this way, the suffering will not have been in vain ... The effects of lockdown, now becoming clearer by the day, should never be forgotten.

Government policy was essentially based on the premise that there was a deadly pandemic and that lockdowns were an appropriate and proportionate strategy to combat the virus.

This four-part series examines the government claims, presents evidence examining whether the benefits outweighed the harms, and addresses moral and ethical issues, particularly in the light of the statements made by Professor John Ioannidis, “We destroyed our kids, and we can do it again”, and by Professor Jay Bhattacharya, who said:

If the current configuration of power in public health and politics stands, we will respond by saying, ‘Look, the lockdown's the only way’, and just as happened in 2020, it'll be the laptop class that'll benefit, and the poor and the vulnerable and children who will be harmed.

Part 1 focuses on the justification for lockdowns and examines the evidence and the data available at the time regarding the damage to children caused by the lockdowns and resulting school closures and sets it against what actually happened. Part 2 will continue to examine the evidence that the authorities knew at the time and concludes with an analysis of the totality of the management of the so-called ‘pandemic’. Parts 3 and 4 will look at the impact of school closures through the eyes of the children and the educators.

The Justification for Lockdowns

"We’ve come to the conclusion [that] the evidence strongly supports [the view] that there was no pandemic". So said Professor Martin Neil at the Scottish People’s Covid Inquiry on 22 February 2025. At a sweep, this removed the justification for all the restrictions placed on society, including, of course, children. Professor Neil’s excellent presentation presents the data around the patterns of death in the UK and across Europe and clear evidence of excess deaths in hospitals, care homes, and at home due to the policies. It also discusses the attribution and certification of deaths and reveals the fraudulent use of PCR testing.

All the data is available in Fighting Goliath: Exposing the Flawed Science and Statistics behind the COVID-19 Event by Professor Neil and Professor Norman Fenton, with credit given to the now-US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Professor Bhattacharya, Dr Jessica Hockett, Dr Jonathan Engler, and many more. As Neil and Fenton wrote in the book:

There never was a pandemic in the conventional sense, as understood by the public, that involved mass casualties or even the realistic threat of additional risk from a supposedly novel virus. If we had done nothing the world would not have noticed anything unusual.

They thereby confirmed the detailed 2024 research by Pandata’s Thomas Verduyn based on 2020 data, which found:

• No evidence that the Chinese lockdown had any impact on the trajectory of either Covid cases or deaths.

• No evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was highly transmissible.

• No evidence that Covid was unusually lethal.

• No evidence that anything significant happened in China as a result of Covid (other than the lockdown itself).

• Nothing that can support the WHO’s decision to consider Covid a pandemic.

Indeed, there is very clear evidence that suggesting that the so-called ‘pandemic’ was manufactured by shifting the goalposts, as Simon Elmer  pointed out in his excellent 2023 UK Column article.

Firstly, the definition of what was a medical case was changed from a person requiring medical attention to a person registering positive on a highly debatable test.

Secondly, an inappropriate PCR test operated at an overly high frequency was used to define a ‘case’. The PCR test used to identify cases — the apparently rising tide of which was the justification for lockdowns, masks, quarantines, and closures — does not appear to be fit for purpose. As Professor Jack Lambert, Ireland’s leading infectious disease expert, stated:

PCR cannot distinguish infectious live virus from residual dead virus or viral fragments from previous infection. Therefore, many ‘cases’ have no real meaning in terms of medical status or transmission potential; it will probably identify harmless viral fragments and the test will be deemed ‘positive’. In Ireland, Ct [cycle threshold] value cut-offs of 35–45 are the norm. High Ct values (over 35 or even 30) suggest a non-infectious patient.

Yet they applied a cycle frequency in the 40-45 range. Professor Lambert also points out that the viral activity had passed by Summer 2020. The inventor of the test, Nobel Prize winner Dr Kary Mullis, explained succinctly why the test is inappropriate. Similarly, according to a 2022 report by Professors Heneghan, Jefferson, et al., “PCR is an important and powerful tool, but its systematic misuse and misreporting risk undermining its usefulness and credibility”.

Thirdly, doctors were directed to register all deaths as Covid deaths if the person had a positive PCR test.

And lastly, media were in place to enforce the message. Yet, no-one in authority has addressed these valid points. Professor Neil’s comprehensive conclusions at the Scottish People’s Covid Inquiry Conference include:

• No evidence of viral pathogenicity before the behavioural changes to society.

• A re-attribution of deaths to Covid from other causes.

• Deaths that did occur were caused by the medical and public health response and were not due to a novel virus.

• Every single policy not only failed to mitigate deaths from the virus, but evidently made the situation worse.

• The Covid event was created primarily by the fraudulent PCR testing, changes to death attribution, and iatrogenesis.

The Neglect of Our Children

Article 3 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states:

In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.

In the context of Article 3, these statements by powerful individuals and bodies particularly resonated with me, and still do. Northern Ireland’s Chief Medical Officer said in 2021 to Paul Frew MLA,“It’s nothing to do with the children. It was to keep their parents at home”, explaining why they closed schools. When Northern Ireland’s then-Health Minister Robin Swann was asked why he banned kids’ outdoor sports on the advice of Michael McBride and Ian Young (CMO & CSA), he admitted that it wasn't based upon scientific evidence, but rather upon a 'Stay at Home' message. They didn't want people going outdoors!

Even Professor Chris Whitty, who was England’s Chief Medical Officer at the time, said in August 2021 that “Children are more likely to be harmed by not returning to school than if they catch coronavirus”. He added, “the chances of children dying from Covid-19 are incredibly small” and that missing lessons “damages children in the long run”. Robert Halfon, the then-Chairman of the House of Commons Education Select Committee, stated in 2022 that closing schools was “the biggest and most catastrophic mistake the Government made during Covid. What is frightening is that there was very little consideration given to the disadvantage that pupils would face from school closures”.

How Could They Not Have Known?

The leaders did know that Covid wasn’t deadly.

The then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson stated in July 2021 that “It’s always worth stressing ... for the overwhelming majority of people who get it … this is going to be a mild to moderate illness ... even in the elderly groups. Likewise, Professor Whitty said at the time, “The great majority will survive it, even if they are in their 80s”.

The result of giving “very little consideration to the children” is highlighted in a 2023 UCL study, ‘Pandemic Policies Overlooked Long-term Needs of Children’, which investigated the outcomes of the UK Government’s restrictions on children in 2020-2022. They were nothing short of a disaster:

Children were forgotten by policymakers during Covid lockdowns.

As young people weren’t considered to be at high risk from Covid-19 directly, pandemic policy decisions largely ignored their needs and resulted in their long-term detriment, finds a global consortium of universities led by UCL researchers.

Infants, children, and teenagers endured numerous lockdowns during their most formative years, despite accounting for a diminutive proportion of Covid hospitalisations and deaths.

The UCL study found that politicians did not consider children and young people a ‘priority group’ when English lockdowns were enforced, and that infants born into the Covid restrictions have marked delays in brain development.

Interactive play and leisure for children and young people likewise moved largely inside and online as social distancing policies were enacted. Play is crucial for children’s cognitive and social development, and is a recognised right of the child.

The researchers expected that:

The impact of the pandemic will have detrimental consequences for children and young people in the short and long-term, with many not yet visible … It will have continuing consequences for their future in terms of professional life trajectories, healthy lifestyles, mental well-being, educational opportunities, self-confidence and more besides.

And that confirms March 2021 UNESCO research, a 2020 Ofsted Inspectorate report, and a NWEA 2020 report. As predicted in the 2023 UCL report, in 2025:

White working class pupils [are] behind in nearly all state secondary schools. They are children whose interests too many politicians have simply discarded [emphasis added] ... The proportion of white working-class pupils getting grades 5 or above in English and maths GCSE was 18.6 percent, substantially below the 45.9 percent national average.

These are children whose schools were closed during the crucial time when they are learning to read, when they would have been approaching the functional literacy threshold, and who needed schooling to help them cross that threshold and whose lives have been forever restricted.

Comprehensive Details of the Damage to Children

Though the French writer Renaud Camus worded it more dramatically in his article entitled ‘On the Destruction of Western Education’, no one has been held accountable. Anyone who did not understand the lessons of the Diamond Princess from February 2020 was not qualified to be in government or was wilfully and criminally negligent. So this is an evidential record of the Covid years when policies were enacted that were not necessary. The children were not at risk and were not a risk to anyone else; furthermore, the policies did not work and caused huge harms. All of this was known by the authorities throughout.

The evidence provided below is presented in the form of a timeline, with recent research interwoven to show how evidence presented at the time has stood the test of time. My interview with Stephen Frost of Medical Doctors for Covid Ethics International summarises how I got here. It provides a summary of the more detailed evidence which follows. Please be patient as the opening is slightly disrupted. [Editor’s Note: The author’s presentation/published article total is now around 80, not the 50 mentioned in the interview].

The justification of the restrictions placed on children was given as the risks to older people being around children. The most notorious headline related to this was, ‘Don’t Kill Granny with Coronavirus, Warns Matt Hancock’.

However, the evidence and the actuality said something very different.

“They aren’t taking it home and then transferring it to the community. These kids have very little capacity to infect household members”, said Public Health England epidemiologist Shamez Ladhani in July 2021.

In August 2020,  a European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) report  concluded that children were much less likely to contract the virus. It reported that “re-opening schools has not [emphasis added] been associated with significant increases in community transmission”.

Were the children at risk? Data from official sources in  Scotland,  Northern Ireland, Canada, the USA,  Ireland,  and Iceland showed that no healthy child has died of Covid. In fact, according to Ireland’s Central Statistics Office, from the end of January 2020-end of January 2021, amongst the population of people aged 1-24, there were 55,565 PCR-confirmed cases of Covid. Out of those cases, there had not been a single death from, by, or associated with Covid. Similarly, in Scotland, there were no Covid deaths for anyone under the age of 24 with no pre-existing conditions. The impact of the restrictions on university students who fall into this age bracket is considered later. Updated data from Northern Ireland is available here.

A 2022 analysis of the FDA’s data showed that the risk of any child dying of Covid is 0.000015% (less than a sixth of one in a million). As the Canadian Health Alliance noted, “without a serious pre-existing medical condition, the risk of death is statistically zero”. Furthermore, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have pointed out that the common flu is far more dangerous for children than the coronavirus disease.

So there was no pandemic, no children died, they were not a risk to anyone, and as highlighted earlier, their interests were simply dismissed, but children were still subjected to restrictions which caused them great harms.

The Damage to Our Children

Dr David Bell and I presented an overview of the harms children experienced, using a revealing overview of available government data from 2020 and 2021. As written in the article, “We have reset our expectations regarding truth, decency, and the care of children. In an amoral world the happiness, the health, and the life of a child only carries the importance we are told to attach to it”.

Remember these headlines?

‘How Lockdown Broke a Generation and No One Seems to Care'

School closures had a devastating impact on education. Pupils starting in reception in 2019 spent, on average, 85 days out of class. Some, especially those placed in ‘bubbles’ where entire year groups were sent home if just one pupil tested positive, missed far more. As a result, the proportion of pupils meeting literacy and numeracy benchmarks at the end of primary school fell from 65% in 2018-19 to 59% in 2021-22.

Likewise, a German study concluded that “stress, anxiety, and social isolation” led to children’s intelligence levels dropping when schools were closed.

‘Lockdowns Killed Hundreds of Thousands of Children, Says the UN — Was It Really Worth it?’

A review of the education, development and mental health damage across the world is presented with teetering education systems around the world on the brink of collapse due to lockdowns estimated to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, including 228,000 in South Asia, according to a March 2021 UNICEF report.

‘Huge rise in pupil mental health emergencies’

There has been a dramatic rise in the number of children being referred for emergency mental health treatment. The increase comes after headteachers warned that schools were being left to deal with a ‘tsunami of pressures’ affecting pupil wellbeing, following the pandemic.

In early 2024, it was reported that “Data analysed by the Royal College of Psychiatrists shows a 53 percent rise over three years in referrals to child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) crisis teams in England”.

‘Lockdown’s Tragic Legacy for Our Two Million Troubled Teens’

This 2023 article showed the real price of Covid through the terrible impact of lockdowns on the UK’s adolescents. It said, “Schoolchildren, who were the least likely to suffer serious health problems from coronavirus, are the ones most affected by the legacy of lockdowns. Lockdown was our generation’s greatest error”.

‘Lockdown Has Given Us a Truancy Epidemic’

More than a quarter of parents believe the pandemic showed it was not essential for children to attend school daily.

The decision to close schools for so long during the pandemic lockdowns was arguably the worst mistake made during those dark days. The impact on the education and mental wellbeing of a cohort of children in their mid-teens is still being felt.

But the closures also had a psychological effect on their parents. According to official data, the proportion of pupils classed as persistently absent and missing more than one lesson in 10 has doubled since March 2020.

The politicians and teachers who were happy to shut down schools when children were the least likely group to be affected by Covid should now rue the consequences. It has even become necessary for the Government to launch a campaign to reverse this trend and persuade parents that school is essential for the child’s future prospects and social development.

This is aimed at a growing group, mostly in under-privileged households, who no longer feel an obligation to force their offspring out of the door even if it is a legal requirement that they do. They were encouraged in this by a cavalier attitude to school attendance that was apparent throughout the pandemic.

‘Pupil Suspensions Reach Record High following Lockdown School Closures’

Children who stayed home during [the] pandemic are now ‘taking it out on teachers’ after being forced to return to classrooms, experts say.

The number of pupils suspended from school has reached a record high as experts warn that bad behaviour has increased since lockdown school closures.

Data from the Department for Education (DfE) found that there were 263,904 suspensions in the spring term during the 2022/23 academic year, an increase from 201,090 during the period the year before.

In the same term, there were 3,039 permanent exclusions, an increase from 2,179.

Academics warned that the ‘deeply concerning’ increase was a result of pupils losing the habit of going to school during the Covid-19 pandemic.

A spokesman for the DfE said: ‘The most common reason for suspensions and permanent exclusions was persistent disruptive behaviour’.

The figures showed a 31 per cent increase in suspensions compared to the previous year, the highest outside of Covid restrictions.

Related to this, the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) reported that the “lockdowns had a 'catastrophic' impact on children's social and emotional skills”.

‘School Starters Born during Pandemic Lack Communication Skills, Ofsted Says’

Primary schools are having to teach infants how to communicate, as they struggle to make friends or cope with lessons because of speech and language difficulties. The research by Ofsted inspectors, based on visits to schools in England rated as good or outstanding, found that the Covid pandemic ‘is still having an impact on children’s behaviour and social skills’.

And a 2024 report found that the number of children with speech, language, and communication needs in Northern Ireland “has almost doubled”:

Key statistics which highlight the challenges faced by workers in the field include:

Early Years Providers reported a 90% increase in the number of children presenting with speech, language, and communication needs.

70% of community paediatricians reported an increase in referrals to the Child Development Clinic.

This report reiterated what was known in 2021 and reported in 2022, yet no one has been held accountable.

An Ofsted report from spring 2022 highlighted the damaging effects of the restrictions on the development of young children and should have been enough to set alarm bells ringing, as it recorded:

• Delays in babies’ physical development.

• Babies struggling to crawl and communicate.

• Babies suffering delays in learning to walk.

Delays in speech and language, noted to be partly attributable to the imposition of face masks.

A study by Irish researchers found that babies born during March to May 2020, when Ireland was locked down, were less likely to be able to say at least one definitive word, point, or wave goodbye at 12 months old. A further study published in Nature found children aged three months to three years scored almost two standard deviations lower in a proxy measurement of development similar to IQ. With 90 percent of brain development taking place in the first five years of life, this is tragic.

These articles chart the decline in children’s development and performance through the age groups due to school closures and isolation, they further document the damage to a generation of children and serve as a record to remind us of what was done to them. They use data which was readily available in 2021 and 2022. We denied our young people all the activities which help their mental health. We closed schools, isolated them, banned sport, travel, parties, plays, and church. What did we expect to happen?

As Dr Bell stated, “We have to stand against the tide. History will remember those who did and those who did not”.

NFER reports, Education Endowment Trust research, the internationally recognised PISA tests, reports from paediatric specialists, and the Ofsted report are known to the authorities and contain publicly available data to show the decline in education achievement, development, and mental health.

The Guardian reported in 2023:

The OECD’s programme for international student assessment (Pisa), which compares educational attainment among 15-year-olds around the world, showed UK schoolchildren achieved their lowest scores in mathematics and science since 2006 – the first year of comparable data.

The US saw its steepest decline since tests began.

This May 2021 article essentially repeats the case against school closures which I had made to our authorities in June 2020 and which sets out learning losses. The Children’s Commissioner for England and Wales, Anne Longfield, reported that as of 8 March 2021, the Class of 2021 had lost the equivalent of 840 million school days. Given that shocking statistic, it cannot be surprising that many children are regressing educationally, according to Ofsted.

In terms of children’s health generally, the number of under-18s waiting for NHS care in England was the highest on record in 2024. Record numbers of young people have been seeking help for mental health conditions. The NHS reported that “one in five children had a mental disorder in 2023”. Soaring numbers await mental health services, with almost a million children holding referrals to mental health services in 2024, according to the Children’s Commissioner. This number rose to 1.5 million in 2025.

According to a study by the University of Bristol in 2021, five times more children committed suicide than died of Covid during lockdown.

Surely, someday, our children will ask why they were penalised — why they were denied education, not allowed to see friends, and not allowed to travel. They will certainly ask why they were denied those once-in-a-lifetime experiences: starting their first year at secondary school, passing exams, finishing their last year at school, or starting university on campus and not behind a computer screen.

When they do ask, there will be no good answer. This foreboding statement from a five-year-old schoolgirl serves to emphasise the dangers: “I don’t need anybody to play. I am used to being lonely”.

No one has taken responsibility nor has been held accountable.

They knew. They did it anyway.

Part 1 considered how the needs and, indeed, the rights of children were ignored and the resulting harms to them. Part 2 of this four-part series will consider the management of the so-called ‘pandemic’ and show how the range of policies failed. It will postulate that the authorities must have known that Covid was not deadly and that the range of previously rejected policies would not work.

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Originally published on UKColumn

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