All children need to be loved. But there’s one other vital thing they must receive, if they are to grow up healthy and happy.

A sense of safety.

Children need to believe that they are secure and protected: safe, in other words. They need order, predictability, the assurance that the adults in their lives have things basically under control.

This gives them a stable launch-pad from which to go out into the world, confidently exploring its delights, uncertainties, risks and dangers. The safety they have – hopefully – experienced as a child stays with them into adulthood. It becomes the basis of their independence, resilience and self-reliance, as well as their capacity to love and be loved.

Yet since the beginning of lockdown restrictions, particularly the closure of schools, our children’s sense of safety has been shattered.

They have been locked up at home, denied the company of their friends and peers, denied anything resembling a proper education. They have watched as many of the adults around them succumb to fear, acting like the apocalypse is upon us, rather than a nasty disease that is lethal in a small fraction of cases, overwhelmingly affecting the frail and elderly.

The sight of these lost little souls is heartbreaking. Forced to wear face-masks, treated like deadly vectors of disease, they are unwitting guinea-pigs in the biggest medical experiment in history.

Unaware of the vast harm being done to them by a society so consumed by panic that it has forgotten the most vulnerable, precious people of all.

The unbearable irony is that these helpless child-hostages to our own terror are not threatened by the coronavirus itself. They are more likely to be struck by lightning, or be killed by the flu, than die from Covid. Yet the sacrifices we exact from them – because they have zero choice in the matter, their lives being entirely in our hands – are ruinous to their development and wellbeing.

The wholesale abandonment of the children has not gone entirely unnoticed. Child health experts have repeatedly warned of the devastating consequences.

The most recent alarm call came this week, from ten of the UK’s top experts in child health. They say that anxiety, self-harm and suicidal thoughts are at “frightening levels” among children, as a result of the lockdown measures, and that many parents are on the verge of breakdown. To avoid imminent calamity, they are calling for schools to fully reopen, with vaccinations for staff.

Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that, even without vaccines, teachers are at no greater risk of dying from Covid-19 than the general population.

So what are we waiting for?

The kids could hardly be less alright, yet where is the emergency response? Where is the urgent plan of action? Where is the reversal of policies that have proved so harmful to their young lives?

Nowhere.

Because virus monomania blinds the authorities, large sections of the media, and even larger swathes of social media, to these inconvenient truths. They are in thrall to the cult-like creed of lockdown, and all must fall before it. Even facts.

Incredibly, when those ten leading public health doctors, paediatricians and academic published their letter, they were accused of inventing children’s distress for political gain.
That’s right. Huge numbers of children are contemplating suicide, and when doctors report it, they are told they’re making it up, out of self-interest.

What is wrong with us? What have we become?

In the same way, those who express concern about the dire effects of lockdown measures are ritually labelled ‘Covid-deniers’ with ‘blood on their hands’. The ever-growing scientific evidence that lockdown restrictions are ineffective in preventing deaths, and are on track to cost many, many more lives than they save, is either trashed or disregarded.

Truly, there is no other god but corona.

In the madness of the current climate, it is almost impossible to see how change will happen.

If we can ignore something as profound as the devastation of children’s lives, then we’re in so deep that I wonder if we will ever get out again.