Empower Wisconsin  | June 22, 2022

The World Health Organization (WHO) has finally conceded what has been evident for the brunt of the pandemic: That COVID lockdowns have created a “global crisis for mental health.”

As The Daily Mail reports, an international report by the UN agency found two years of restrictions have led to ‘significant mental health consequences’, especially for young people.

The WHO now estimates more than a billion people around the world are living with a mental health disorder as a result, a quarter more than pre-Covid.

According to The Daily Mail:

The WHO report said there had been an even bigger rise among children, ‘potentially reflecting the deep impact of school closures’.

Curbs imposed to control Covid led to feelings of ‘social isolation, disconnectedness and uncertainty about the future’, the report added.

The admission comes despite the WHO hailing China’s lockdowns at the start of the pandemic and warning that lifting measures too early in Britain may cause a ‘deadly resurgence’ in 2020…

The report was signed off by Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the WHO, who faced heavy criticism for his handling of the pandemic, which was deemed to be very ‘China-centric’, heaping praise on China’s communist party for its response to the Covid outbreak.

After meeting Chinese president Xi Jinping in January 20202, he said: ‘I was very encouraged and impressed by the president’s detailed knowledge of the outbreak and his personal involvement in the outbreak. 

‘This was for me a very rare leadership.’ 

The WHO is about two years late to the table. Mental health experts and others have been warning since the start of the pandemic that stay-at-home orders and school closures would come with a huge cost. The research in the summer of 2020 pointed to problems ahead. Health care organizations argued for re-opening schools, saying the risk of social, emotional and intellectual damage to children from locking them out of classrooms was much greater than the health effects from contracting COVID-19.

Yet, public officials refused to follow the science. The Evers administration’s lockdown orders ended only when they were challenged in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. School districts, bullied by teachers unions, kept in-person learning shut down in some cases, on and off, for well over a year.

The research is stark on what locking students out of schools has done to them.

“Everything was taken away from our kids,” Allison McCool, director of social work for Children’s Wisconsin in Milwaukee told Wisconsin Public Radio. “School was changed to virtual, any kind of social activities or their typical coping activities were really taken away. It’s like everyone has lost a couple of years of their lives.”

In October, the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Children’s Hospital Association declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health.

While the science became increasingly clear about the destructive seeds pandemic lockdowns and shutdowns were sewing, Big Government leaders from the smallest communities to the Swamp in Washington, D.C. kept pushing their power trips.

The question is, who will hold them accountable for taking so much from our children?