COLLEGE STUDENTS HAVE SHOWN DEEP DEFICITS OF KNOWLEDGE AND CRITICAL THINKING REGARDING CORONAVIRUS

College students, what has been wrong with you for the past 18 months?

Historically, students have protested about a wide range of issues: segregation, wars, environmental damage, university investment practices, et al. Basic conditions facilitated this activism: students were concentrated on campuses, they had spare time that wage workers and homemakers lacked, and they were inquisitive and idealistic. Protesting was also a good way to meet women.

Students often conducted large rallies and teach-ins, organized strikes and boycotts and broke into university presidents’ offices. Once in, these erstwhile “insurrectionists” sometimes stayed for days. While I was in college, students protested from the first week, about a faculty tenure decision, until graduation day, because the gowns weren’t made by union labor. The years between encompassed an overlapping series of causes. Throughout, students wore t-shirts or buttons exhorting others to “Question Authority.”

During the past 18 months, students have passively abdicated their traditional social consciousness-raising role. Students used to be radicals. Now they’re TikTok-stupefied reactionaries who have naively internalized and sponsored the corporate media and government lie that Covid imperiled all Americans, regardless of age or health status.

I work with college students. When I have asked them why students have tolerated Coronavirus closures, a few have confided that they knew closing schools was a poor idea. But they felt outnumbered; a wave of social media sentiment supported closures. It seemed futile to swim against the tide.

Disappointingly, most students with whom I have spoken supported closures. This cohort displayed an absence of knowledge regarding the very low risks that keeping colleges open would have entailed. Even if infected, 99.97% of students survive without treatment; with treatment, these rates improve. Survival odds are better than during typical flu seasons.

School closure supporters have also displayed deep critical thinking deficits. They have advocated extreme measures to limit slight risks to a clearly identifiable segment of the population, without considering such measures’ costs to the vast majority. Our schools have failed to educate students to command facts and place these facts in their larger context. Neither most students, nor their teachers, can discern between good options and bad ones.

Despite their “wokeness,” students and teachers have been in a deep Coronavirus sleep. Students have characteristically, gullibly bought the easy, superficial, false label; in particular, the myth that students are “super spreaders.” Infected students would typically have manifested mild or no symptoms. Consequently, they would have been unlikely to infect old people. How often does a college student even see an older person, much less share space with them?

Lockdown-supporting students also frequently cite the exception, and ignore the rule. They invoke a single example they heard from some unidentified news source regarding one--probably fundamentally unhealthy student--who died with--probably not from--Coronavirus somewhere. Public policy cannot sensibly be predicated on vague, rare, anecdotal exceptions.

The recent, extreme risk aversion of many college students and administrators is especially odd given college life’s widely accepted risks. Students often engage in, and college administrators routinely condone, substance abuse and sexual activity, reasoning that these often consequential behaviors are age-appropriate and even socially functional and psychologically necessary: kids being kids.

Students should have mingled from the beginning of the “pandemic.” The resultant development of natural immunity among students would have served as an additional societal brake on infection of those at higher risk. Natural immunity is 27 times more robust than is injected immunity. But pharmaceutical giants can’t profit from natural immunity.

Students could also have treated the 2020 elections as a referendum on the lockdowns, and voted against Democrats who orchestrated and supported these. But they didn’t.

Further, students, who were never at significant virus risk, have passively tolerated the mandated, experimental injection of a purported “vaccine.” Vaxx effectiveness appears to be short-lived. As data from intensive, early vaccinators Israel, the UK, Iceland and Scotland show, vaxx effects seem to “wear off” within five months. Consequently, Israel has begun another vaxx campaign, adding a third shot to the prior two shot protocol.

The risk of student vaxxes never justified any ostensible rewards. Nearly all students were fine without vaxxing. Yet, numerous healthy students have developed myocarditis after vaxxing; some have died. The bigger concern is that injections may cause long-term harm. Long term safety studies haven’t been conducted; there wasn’t time to do so during a reckless “warp speed” process. Some researchers have observed that the Covid mRNA injections move through the body more readily than do conventional vaccines. Some fraction of mRNA vaccines are said to land in the ovaries of young injectees. Some vaxx critics say that vaxxes are causing the virus to mutate, thus enhancing risk not only to injectees but also to the uninjected.

Aside from the vaxx’s adverse physical effects, vaxx mandates deprive students of medical freedom. Intrusions on medical freedom seem a far weightier issue than many that students have protested in the past five decades.

Student vaxx mandates were never about public health. They’re about coercion and party politics. This was obvious even before universities like Rutgers required on-line students to vaxx.

Ultimately, the vaxx crusade is an effort to sell the Big Lie that Democrat state and municipal governments’ various Coronavirus interventions saved humanity. Such a belief will help these governments to avert blame for the persistent harms caused by the lockdowns, and to justify broader and stricter future restrictions. Most students have been indoctrinated to accept a very wide range of governmental control, so they’ll meekly accept such revisionism.

Presumably, in-person college is much more valuable than are on-line classes. If on-line education equals the overall quality of an in-person classroom and social experience, universities should shift fully to the virtual model. They would save considerable money by divesting buildings and laying off most faculty and administrators. College costs could drop sharply and students could avert decades of debt. Plus, some latter day students are introverts; they’d rather sit in front of a screen than interact with peers.

But for the majority, the in-person college experience allows students to do things and meet people that they can’t do, or meet, during any other stage of life. Students just gave up a year and a third of that rare experience, without scientific basis.

The past 18 months are gone forever. Students’ ignorance, passivity and poor risk assessment have cost them many irreplaceable experiences, memories and relationships. Student passivity has also enabled the society-wide panic narrative and overreaction that has landed very directly on many non-students, including those in other nations: the isolation, the unemployment, the depression, the overdoses, the suicides, the lost dreams, the poverty, the hunger, et al.

Really bad work, students. Epic fail.