The Cult of Covid
Bizarre public behavior of education leaders reveals troubling pathology as virus mania reaches new levels of madness
(Photo Credit: Marketwatch)
At a school board meeting Monday night for District 59 in Elk Grove Village, a masked woman, believed to be a board of education member, ordered a group of parents attending the meeting to mask up or else.
“If you refuse to wear a mask, we are going to ask you to leave the meeting. If you refuse to leave the meeting, you are in violation of our district and our board policies…and there will be consequences for that,” said the masked woman.
Later in the meeting, the district board passed a resolution requiring masks for all students, regardless of vaccination status.
Amidst cat calls (the majority of public speaking at the meeting were on the side of mask optional), D59 board members later attempted to explain their decision.
“Can’t we just get started with the masks…” one said.
“We need to get the testing going…it’s critical…” another said.
Listening to these board members, who have fallen deep into the recesses of Covid Hysteria, it reminded me of scenes from the Netflix series “Waco.”
The series focuses on the 1993 standoff in Waco, Texas between the FBI and the Branch Davidian cult, led by leader David Koresh.
In one of the later episodes, as the FBI closes in on the group, Koresh, played by Taylor Kitsch, sings a song titled, “I Still Believe.”
It’s a last gasp effort from Koresh to rally his cultists, who all stand around in the room, listening and moving around in a zombie-like haze to the farcical events unfolding around them.
That’s where things currently stand in this country. The cult is not a religion but a virus, Covid, the believers unable to quit believing even though the truth is surrounding them just like the FBI encircled the Branch Davidians members almost three decades ago.
The biggest problem now is how the Cult of Covid has infected people actually in charge of things that matter in this country—the federal government, state public health agencies, teacher’s unions, school boards, superintendents. They have real power and are using it to inflict damage on children and their families.
They say it’s the guidance, the guidance, the guidance. How the alphabet soup of federal and state agencies (CDC/IDPH/ISBE) are recommending masking so they need to as well. That’s how they justify their actions. They say how in-person learning is front and center this school year and only way it can be done safely is to require masks and to test, test, test, and test again.
“The time it takes to get this testing going is critical…” one D59 board member said Tuesday night.
Let me get this right Mr. School Board Member…the SHIELD saliva COVID-19 test for asymptomatic adolescent teenagers, sped to market by Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker (initially rejected by the FDA) is the answer to ridding ourselves of this dreaded virus?
The language he speaks is not that of a responsible grown up in charge of a school district, but that of a cultist kook.
Do school boards such as D59 and others realize that once they approve testing, the masking is never going to end? Do they know that testing asymptomatic kids is the dumbest thing they can possibly do?
Here’s why—because adolescent teenagers are in no danger from Covid.
This data according to the Wood House newsletter in an article published in July:
From January 2020 through now, there have been 335 pediatric deaths involving COVID-19 in the United States. That’s .0004% of the country’s 74 million children age 0-17, and 0.6% of all 49,725 pediatric deaths that have occurred in the same timeframe.
The agency’s disease burden estimates put the number of infections for children at nearly 27 million between February 2020 - March 2021. By now, we’re at 30 million plus. Either way, we’re still looking at 99.998% survival. (Indeed, in my Chicagoland county of ~1 million residents, there have been zero COVID-related deaths under age 20. As in, n=0.)
Having spent this past weekend at Lollapalooza in downtown Chicago, the drugs and alcohol consumed by teenagers at the four-day festival should be more concerning to community leaders than Covid.
Where were the special meetings or community bulletins about that?
I guess everyone is too busy drawing up slides about physical distancing and contact tracing.
At another school board meeting Monday night, District 203 superintendent Dan Bridges (Naperville North and Central High Schools, along with 20 preschool, elementary and junior high schools) used close contacts guidelines for unmasked students as a supporting rationale for why he was recommending universal masking to start the 2021-22 school year.
New guidelines from the CDC, adopted by the Illinois Department of Public Health, define a close contact as:
An individual not fully vaccinated against COVID-19 who was within 6 feet of an infected person for a cumulative total of 15 minutes or more over a 24-hour period. According to the new CDC close contact definition, classroom students who were within 3 to 6 feet of the infected student are not treated as close contacts as long as both the infected student and exposed student were engaged in consistent and correct use of a well-fitting mask and other K-12 school prevention strategies (such as universal and correct mask use, physical distancing, increased ventilation) were in place in the K-12 setting. In other words, only classroom contacts within 3 feet require quarantine as long as both the case and the contact were consistently masked. If they were not consistently masked, then close contacts are classroom students who were within 6 feet of the infected student for a cumulative total of 15 minutes or more over a 24-hour period.
Clearly, close contact rules incentivize schools to approve universal masking. By mandating masking, leaders believe students will have a greater chance to avoid unnecessary quarantines and stay in the classroom, a major priority of education leaders all summer.
But have they even reviewed data about the adverse effects of masking on children? Of the stunting of learning development? Do they care? I wonder.
And why the testing? Close contact labels are avoidable if no one knows someone has Covid. And with a 99.998% survival rate, why do we care if a child has Covid?
Because they can spread it to teachers and older family members.
Then those people should get vaccinated. They’ve had ample time. Over 50% of the Illinois population has been dosed at this point.
But why the unshakable anxiety about children?
We know why.
Because it’s not about kids.
It’s about power, control and the unreasonable fears of adults who should know better.
At the Monday night D203 meeting, one of the speakers chose to outfit himself with what appeared to be a floor mat and N95 mask:
I believe this nut job left the school board meeting early to attend a gathering of the DuPage County Branch Davidian Chapter.
At another Monday night board of education meeting, for District 113 (Deerfield/Highland Park High Schools), the meeting came to a screeching halt for almost 15 minutes over mask wearing during the meeting.
A board member named Jodi Shapira, speaking virtually, multiple times scolded those attending the meeting in person for not muzzling their mouths with a cloth covering.
“It’s about having respect for one another,” she said, failing to mention how there was no notification of a non-binding mask policy before the meeting.
The other board members in the room agreed with Shapira, condescendingly admonishing the non-mask wearers before hammering through a mask mandate before public comment.
(watch from about the 13:00 mark to 28:00…absolute absurdity)
This is acceptable behavior from an elected school board?
(D113 is one of the more sheepish districts in Chicagoland. It lapped up Pritzker’s SHIELD testing early on and did not hold any in-person learning classes in 2020-21 until late spring.)
Then, during the public comment part of the D113 BOE meeting, another board member, Gayle Byck, had this exchange with a resident, Michelle Hammer:
A summary of the dialogue—a district school board member, (Byck) threatened a resident (Hammer) with a restraining order while also yelling a perfunctory “fuck you” before another board member stepped in and cut off the contentious exchange.
Are you kidding me? What is going here?
What these board meetings reveal—adult terror over a virus that if vaccinated from the virus, poses no threat.
But these people, these paralyzed, horror-struck, weak-kneed lambs, are charged with making massively important decisions.
And they are screwing it up. Badly.
(It’s not every school district. There are several that have passed reasonable mask optional plans for the 2021-22 school year, who have stuck to their stated insistence of “local control.” Let’s hope they stay true to those plans.)
I hope those with skin in the game—parents, students, other stakeholders—realize that with every day that goes by this month, and we inch closer to schools re-opening, the conflict gets more and more real.
There are substantial outcomes at stake here.
At the end of the Netflix series “Waco,” the FBI gets their man.
Koresh goes down in a blaze of fire and bullets.
We don’t want fire and bullets here.
But some show of force, some public sign of solidarity is necessary to change the narrative.
Because the Covid Cultists are not going away.
They are loud and vulgar and coming after your children.
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