“Overall, 37.1% of students experienced poor mental health during the pandemic. 

In addition, during the 12 months before the survey, 44.2% experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, 19.9% had seriously considered attempting suicide, and 9.0% had attempted suicide”

These were the findings published in the U.S. Centers For Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) latest MMWR report. How could we have seen this catastrophe coming?

Before the world was plunged into lockdowns, researchers and public health officials had this information on June 18, 2019.

“The study by Harvard Medical School researchers shows that from 2000 to 2017, the suicide rate rose by 47 percent among teens age 15 to 19 and 36 percent among those 20 to 24. That’s well above the 30 percent increase seen across all age groups.” wrote the Boston Globe at the time.

Any idea of disadvantaging kids in these age groups with lockdowns and school closures should have been rejected out of hand from the very beginning…But wasn’t…

On July 14, 2020 then CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield warned of this very dire situation citing the urgency to find common ground to reopen schools: “…there has been another cost that we’ve seen, particularly in high schools. We’re seeing, sadly, far greater suicides now than we are deaths from COVID. We’re seeing far greater deaths from drug overdose that are above excess that we had as background than we are seeing the deaths from COVID.” warned the CDC director at the time…in the summer of 2020!

It was clear even at that early juncture in the failed pandemic lockdown response, such horrific wheels were already in motion for young adults in American schools.

Yet as early as October 25, 2020 America and the world had the deadly accurate warning from the original authors of The Great Barrington Declaration. Looking at the scope of restrictive, one-size-fits-all lockdown measures being rapidly enacted without data, The Declaration’s three highly credentialed creators wrote, literally in their opening sentences, the following:

“As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies…”

“The results (to name a few) include…deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.” 

The warnings were on-record in real time early into the pandemic – and they were ignored, censored and viscously attacked with premeditated coordination at the highest levels as top public health policymakers used media power centers to perform targeted strikes against those who wouldn’t back lockdowns.

Somewhere during the beginning of the pandemic response, the CDC MMWR reports, the agency’s in-house science journal influencing both policy and corporate media narratives, became weaponized as a potent political tool.

“In all cases, the papers are uniquely timed to further political goals and objectives; as such, these papers appear more as propaganda than as science.” writes Vinay Prasad in his recent piece How the CDC Abandoned Science.

Attempts to lift lockdowns, restart the economy and get kids back in schools and masks off their faces were often met with conveniently timed ‘science’ on tap from the CDC purporting to show data running counter to such ends.

During much of the pandemic, it was common knowledge that closed schools hurt kids and communities in a myriad of ways. Rather than consulting a variety of researchers, doctors and scientists, the CDC under Walensky’s reign allowed the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to impose line-by-line edits” to school reopening guidance, despite the CDC’s “past practice to keep draft guidance confidential.” an interm report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis shows.

FOX News writes:

The report says the Biden administration provided the teachers’ unions “unprecedented access to the policymaking process for guidance on re-opening schools.”

“Documents and testimony show, however, that Director Walensky downplayed the degree to which CDC departed from past practice to allow AFT to affect the policymaking process. In fact, CDC allowed AFT to insert language into the Operational Guidance that made it more likely schools across the country would remain closed after February 2021,” says the report.

Adding these historical facts together with the scientific data showing how little kids were at risks for COVID paints a picture of willful neglect, at best, by out nation’s public health agencies and officials.

Now, it’s becoming common knowledge that the CDC is a fallen agency. Scrambling to regain its trust and integrity in the public’s eyes, the agency is attempting to buy time announcing plans to revamp the agency in a one-month review to “kick off an evaluation of CDC’s structure, systems, and processes.”

Middle of the road medical and public health pundits are currently writing articles and appear on news outlets trying to strategize and quarterback how the CDC and public health officials can regain the trust of the American public.

How did the CDC’s more than 13,000 scientists, epidemiologists and public health experts miss and continue to ignore the massive mental health disparities racing out of control from the pandemic lockdown response?

How did Dr. Redfield have the info and warn the public early on, yet the agency under his command, and then under Walensky, publish science and create policy recommendations allow this mental health crisis to go further out of control.

Can the CDC be rehabbed at this point?

Meanwhile, the Senate is debating another $10B COVID aid package for the Department of Health and Human Services, the lead agency to which the CDC falls under, to buy more therapeutics, vaccines and testing supplies and prepare for future virus variants.

recent report from The Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigating the COVID crisis was just published on Jan. 27. The GAO delivered a rare “high risk” rating to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), specifically citing the CDC’s poor data management and ineffective messaging.

The GAO designates programs and operations as ‘high risk’ due to their vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement, or because they need transformation.

These deficiencies have hindered the nation’s response to the current COVID-19 pandemic and a variety of past threats, including other infectious diseases according to the GAO.

And we want to give them $10B more?

Where the lockdowns worth it? Even the world’s #1 architect, proponent, media cheerleader and lead attack dog to anyone who disagreed with them now doesn’t even know and is acknowledging their harms:

Jefferey Jaxen

Jefferey Jaxen is a health journalist and featured in his weekly segment, ’The Jaxen Report’, on The HighWire. As an investigative journalist, researcher, and compelling writer, Jefferey serves as Lead editor of The HighWire News and Opinion Team.