Per recently-found CDC study, the number of school closings increased 285 percent (!) in the months before official Covid. Nobody saw or talked about this paper, but they should.
Thanks, Doc. I think God made me go back and see if I could find any more "school closing stories." When I started Googling, "Schools closed due to flu January 2020," I found several links that hadn't showed up two years ago (which is odd). But then I found the study by the Lancet and the CDC on the exact same subject. I couldn't believe it.
I remember when I wrote that original story, I said I was pretty sure that no school year had more school closings than 2019-2020. I remember someone told me I might be wrong and suggested that I hadn't done a comprehensive search (I worked on that research for years).
Well, it seems the CDC did a comprehensive search - and it's not even close. 2019-2020 produced more school closings by some number of standard deviations from the mean. (I would report that standard deviation if I knew how to calculate it!)
I'm actually reading one of Ed Dowd's books on excess deaths. He reports that the number of excess deaths in the middle of 2021 (post-vaccine) was up 40 percent for working people 18 to 64. He said a "10 percent increase" would be a "once-in-200 years anomaly." But the increase was 40 percent!
The increase in school closings compared to the numbers from the previous eight years was .... + 285 percent! I would say that qualifies as "statistically significant."
I'm really enjoying the book. I might review it or run some excerpts. It is a great one to give to people but, as you found out, someone might shoot the messenger.
In my experience most people do shoot the messenger. That said, that's a "wake up book" if there ever was one. I can't say I haven't, oh oops, left behind my copy of Dowd's book in various public places.
I think the word “expert” gets overplayed. The word sounds as if it’s about people that know what they’re talking about. Except in most cases that’s incorrect. Take medicine for example, considered health experts yet can’t cure a thing. Listed by Google as the third leading killer of all Americans but really the first and called experts. I think they’ve tried to have us believe we are stupid but in reality they are like most of the straight A kids from school with no common sense. Great job Bill!
I think you're right. The silver lining of the COVID insanity is the "experts" and "authorities" have lost a lot of the luster they never deserved in the first place. I've read numerous times, as you seem to have, that it's using a narrow definition of medical-caused death to come up with it being the third leading cause. An honest assessment places it at #1. I dunno for sure, but considering how many people I know they've killed, I'm going with #1.
I recently saw an article abstracted in a SubStack that gave evidence that regular flu shots increase the risk of developing flu or flu severity, which is consistent with the data & basic science about the effect of repeated COVID vaccinations increasing the risk & severity of COVID & also with the problems with developing a vaccine for Dengue fever in that the failed vaccine candidates routinely made the vaccinated people significantly sicker when they got their next case of dengue. Also dengue fever is most or more severe when people get it a subsequent time, not the first time. This is consistent with the observation that often the symptoms of many infections are more from the body’s reaction to the infection rather than the effects of the pathogen. (Not at all saying that it would be better if we didn’t have immune system response to invading pathogens, so don’t misunderstand or misquote me—rather that more often than we would like to think, we doctors don’t understand or know what we are doing.
My "Spider Sense" tells me the flu shots are a hidden/unreported or never-investigated scandal in the whole "Covid story."
My working theory is that a very large number of people who became sick with ILI or respiratory symptoms in the second year of Covid (from the fall of 2020 to early 2021) probably had received that year's flu shot.
That's why these people went to the doctor or the hospital. Once in the hospital, the Covid protocols probably killed most of them. But the flu shot might have been the triggering event?
The same thing could have happened in 2019-2020. However, we didn't have the huge spike of deaths in November 2019-February 2020 that we did the next year.
I don't think Covid suddenly became deadly in its SECOND year. I also think large percentages of people had already been exposed to the virus and thus should have had natural immunity.
I wish someone smarter than me would do some kind of study, but this isn't going to happen. What if the flu shots were a massive killer?
Bill, as a young medical student and after I drank the kool aide and got my yearly flu shot. As a healthy young adult, I never missed a single day of class or clinical rotation or work, but I was guaranteed to have at least 2 two week episodes of respiratory illnesses each year. I wrote it off to insufficient hand hygiene, but I now wonder. The episodes didn’t get any milder or less frequent.
Since COVID & after initial 3 shots, I quit all vaxxes (I will get my oral typhoid vaccine before I go overseas this fall, as it is due. & typhoid would be most inconvenient in a third world country), but I have not gotten sick since (now, I also was forced to retire as I was a COVID renegade DOCTOR and they couldn’t have that!—but I also have not been a hermit either.
It would be interesting to see if the flu shot compliant healthcare workers were more or less likely to miss time from work. It wouldn’t be an impossible study to do.
I’ve had four flu shots in my life. Each time I became ill for 3-5 days immediately following the shot, and within a couple of months, I got the flu and was down for 2 weeks. I haven’t gotten a flu shot for over a decade, and I haven’t had the flu. I also passed on the Covid shot. I’ve had Covid twice, relatively short recovery times. The second time was more like a mild cold. Sooooo….I’m a BIG BELIEVER in passing on the flu shots. They act like flu magnets.
As a school principal, I watched every single child and teacher who received the magical combo shot this season get the flu, followed by Covid, followed by respiratory infections. It wasn’t unusual for kids to be out 3-4 weeks at a time, and teachers up to two. SMH.
Did anyone ever think that “Covid” was just the flu rebranded? Your article provides more evidence to me that this was the case. A complete Psy-Op from start to finish.
That's a possibility. Maybe the flu shots made huge numbers of people sick? Something has to explain why significantly more people became sick this flu season. I got sick and so did my two kids and we didn't get that year's flu shot. However, Freedom Fox and others tell me that people who got the flu shot can "shed virus" and cause people who didn't get the shot to also become sick.
For now, though, based on all the stories I've read of people like Ralph Baric messing around with coronaviruses in a lab - and many stories of strange "early outbreaks" (like in nursing homes in Virginia and in other places and vaping illnesses), I'm inclined to think that some kind of more contagious virus did "escape" or was released from a lab.
However, it can't be ruled out that the flu shots might have been the mechanism that made so many more people get sick.
I personally only knew three people who "died from Covid." They were all three ladies, age 70, 80 and 81. All three got sick around November 2020 (the second year of Covid). Then they had long hospital stays and ended up dying. I haven't confirmed this, but I strongly suspect all three had recently received that year's flu vaccine.
This is a strong argument, yet it seems like the first half of a thesis. That is, the opportunity for TPTB to pull off a planned "pandemic" and push the pre-planned response depended upon right timing. Not giving attention to the early spread allowed them a chance to overstate the potential severity of the virus in its impact on children, and to argue against natural immunity, as there was no contradicting body of data if you start the clock later. Most especially this kept the way clear to declare the need for countermeasures (which had already been in the works for a decade, based on CDC patents for COVID tests that were issued in 2002, research by Martin). One might include in this essay the timing of the travel of infected participants from the military games held in China, and their apparent encouragement to their own citizens (many of whom were infected) to travel around the world and share "the wealth." All of these inconvenient aspects of the first act of The Play were swept under the rug by the dearth of media attention.
Thanks for this ... That is my thesis as I've tried to state in previous articles. There has to be some REASON pandemic planners wanted to "date" the start of spread as being mid-December 2019 in Wuhan. Early cases - if "confirmed" - blow up that whole plan or "official narrative" as huge numbers of early cases would show: A) No NPIs designed to "slow" spread could possibly work and B) This virus clearly wasn't "deadly" or we would have all noticed a huge spike in all-cause mortality well before the lockdown dates.
I think "school closings" are THE best metric/evidence that "something different" was happening.
Furthermore, if this was a lab-created novel virus, it DID make millions of people "sick;" but almost everyone survived these common bouts of illness. Personally, I don't think this is that surprising as corona viruses or "flu bugs" don't typically kill many people. That is, this is what you might expect.
My conjecture/thesis: Is the "mad scientists" created a very contagious virus (and I've presented copious evidence to support this theory), but not a "deadly" virus.
I continue to say: "Count the sick people." Were more people becoming sick than normal? My answer: Yes.
FWIW, the CDC produces "flu case" estimates throughout a given flu season. Early in the flu season of 2019-2020, these estimates said this season was shaping up to be one of the most severe and widespread in decades. (I've documented this with contemporaneous ILI reports and media reports).
However, a couple months after "Covid," they "revised" their estimates so the actual revised numbers were BELOW the low-end range they had earlier reported.
The 2019-2020 flu season became almost "normal" compared to previous flu seasons. This revised estimate flies in the face of the story I just reported and, now this CDC paper. How could you have a "normal" flu season that caused almost 3,000 schools in America to close? - 900 more schools than closed in the 2017-2018 flu season, said to be the worst in 40 years?
I missed the earlier chapters. Thanks for gracefully bringing me up to speed. I admire your way of going about it. It's ironic that this was apparently planned so far in advance, and yet uncontrollable factors threatened to disrupt the script. And...as TPTB tend to reuse patterns they like, it also gives us something to monitor in the future. You know, just in case....
There is no proof whatsoever that schools closed due to 'Covid-19'.
Off the top my head, I van think of other causes:
When did the schools close in relation to the distribution of the annual flu shot? Vials of the 2019-2020 annual influenza vaccines were inspected under a microscope and found to contain the same unusual particles as inspected vials of Covid vaccines.
Were there any new vaccines distributed to school age children in 2019? Was there a push for more children to get an existing vaccine?
Were any agents sprayed in the atmosphere during 2019 (for whatever reason) that could have at caused respiratory or other illness in the population in general or in children (who are more sensitive to particulates than adults)?
Are there records of increases in medical illnesses in adults during the same period as the increase of school closings? If so, what made them ill?
Was there an increase of operational 5G cells towers in 2019?
Yes on records of illnesses that made large numbers of adults sick pre-COVID. See my article on “ili tells the tale” and the story on the increase in the number of flu tests given.
This is certainly an interesting observation, I remember you writing about it before. I always look critically at any theory, as one of the best ways to validate a theory is to try like heck to disprove it, and not be able. My first thought was my remembrance was school-age children were so little affected by the alpha/Wuhan strain that it would not have caused as much absenteeism as flu outbreaks. My memory is not perfect, so I asked Grok, and he said:
"You're correct that the original COVID-19 strain (often referred to as the Wuhan or ancestral strain, sometimes later classified as Alpha in the context of variants) generally caused milder illness in school-age children (roughly 5–18 years old) compared to typical seasonal influenza"
Further along, Grok said:
"Seasonal influenza tends to affect school-age children more noticeably than the original COVID-19 strain"
So just another factor to throw into the assessment of what was going on. It would be interesting to know if a lot of the closures were due to sick teachers, rather than sick students. I know a lot of adults who were pretty sick with something weird that winter and figure it was COVID. But kids, maybe, not so much. Of course, Grok isn't perfect. He's pretty good on questions like this though.
In my non expert opinion, the flu shots that are pushed every year weaken people’s immune systems and probably prime them for serious infections like C-19. My husband was strongly encouraged to take a flu shot at work (one of his coworker’s wife was a nurse who administered the jabs in his office) in late 2018 which brought on a severe allergic reaction (hives all over his body). The next year in December 2019, he was very sick with a flu-like illness, losing his sense of smell, which still hasn’t returned. I had a milder version of it in mid January 2020. That nurse, by the way, was pushing the Covid jabs too, which my husband declined, and he heard that she now has all sorts of medical issues.
Hubby got the flu jab in late 2018. He had some kind of pretty severe ILI in December 2019, and I had a milder version in January 2020. We both lost our sense of smell. I recovered mine after about six months. He still can’t smell anything. Something in the flu jab he received caused a severe allergic reaction. Neither of us got any jabs after that.
I also added Kansas to my list of states that had at least one school closing (see below, probably “several”) systems. This tidbit was different as it reported a school closing not due to the number of sick students but because one school employee in Kansas had died from “Influenza B.”
An intriguing bit of info I just found ....
Facebook post (Feb. 12, 2020) from the central office of a school district in Kansas: “As most of you know, our paraprofessional at Park Elementary, Kayauna, passed away on Sunday. Last night we learned that her brother is in intensive care for similar symptoms. The only confirmed diagnosis for each of them at this point is influenza type b. A disease specialist is further investigating any underlying causes of their illness. Being that this can take 48 hours to get results back, we will be closing all schools for Thursday and Friday to ensure that we are taking the proper steps to keep our students safe and protected.”
The paralegal who died was only 20, and you almost never hear of anyone age 20 dying “from the flu.” (I wonder if this was a severe case of Covid?)
AI Overview when I typed in “School closings in Oklahoma and Kansas in January 2020”: “In total, the flu has hit Oklahoma particularly hard this year. According to the Centers for Disease control, Oklahoma is marked as one of the high activity states for the flu, along with neighboring states like Kansas and Texas.”
Seiling Public Schools closes Jan. 15, 2020:
News 9 TV report: "In total, the flu has hit Oklahoma particularly hard this year. According to the Centers for Disease control, Oklahoma is marked as one of the high activity states for the flu, along with neighboring states like Kansas and Texas.”
Google AI’s summary to my query also said that “several localized school closings” had happened in Kansas in 2020, but the only district it specifically cited was the school district where the paralegal died.
Final tidbit of Bonus Content (I added about 12 schools to my original list) including this school system in Arkansas ...
Jan. 31 (2020) - JONESBORO, Ark. (KAIT) - Illness has caused several area schools to cancel classes for either later this week or early next week.
On Friday, Newport Special School District announced it would dismiss classes at 1:30 p.m. and take an AMI day on Monday, Feb. 3, due to student and staff illness. While everyone is away, workers will disinfect the schools.
Newport Superintendent Brett Bunch says there’s no question to it this comes down to straight illness.
“We had a revolving door at our nurse’s office; 20 percent of our student’s population gone," Bunch said.
I find a quote like this in EVERY "flu story" I read:
"A Newport Nurse Practitioner, Vanessa Falwell says her office has been filled and they have seen several upper-respiratory infections. She even added that its not to late to get your flu shot ..."
My comment: Yeah, that flu shot worked great in 2020 ... but it's not too late to go get the flu shot that didn't work.
Bonus content 3 - documenting teacher absenteeism in one TN school district:
"On average, Knox schools have 377 absences per day that require a substitute, Bolton said. In contrast, there were around 600 teacher absences on one of the days before Knox schools closed in January (2020) ..."
My math: 223 more teacher absences in January than usual = an increase of 59.15 percent absenteeism rate.
Note: 265,546 more flu tests were administered in the flu season of 2019-2020 than in the previous flu season (which was also a “bad” flu season). This is an increase of 34 percent in one year. Data from Week 40 to Week 14 based on clinics and hospitals that are a part of the Flu Surveillance System (not all clinics).
Question: Why were so many people going to the doctor and getting flu tests?
I also should note that the vast majority of people who get a flu test actually test negative for Influenza. This was the case in Troy in December 2019 and January 2020, where a local medical clinic administrator told me almost everyone who got a flu test was testing negative, prompting doctors, nurses and administrators to wonder (direct quote): "We thought something was wrong with the flu tests."
Note the same thing happened in one Tennessee County:
"During the week when many East Tennessee school districts closed, 10 percent of patients tested positive for flu at designated Tennessee clinics. That was one of the highest rates in the Southeast. However, Knoxville’s reported flu rate was less than half that -- and schools still closed for three days.
"Only 5 percent tested positive for flu and schools were still closed for three days."
“… The district says 462 students were absent Wednesday out of the 1,286 students enrolled. That’s up from 385 the day before. The district saying many absences were due to flu or flu-like symptoms.
Note: 462 students absent out of 1,286 enrolled = 35.93 percent of students absent.
Editorial comment: That's a "contagious" virus (or, for those who don't believe in contagious viruses, a "contagious something.")
Great job, Bill!
Not often we get a scoop confirmed, so you're right: celebrate with a victory lap.
Thanks, Doc. I think God made me go back and see if I could find any more "school closing stories." When I started Googling, "Schools closed due to flu January 2020," I found several links that hadn't showed up two years ago (which is odd). But then I found the study by the Lancet and the CDC on the exact same subject. I couldn't believe it.
I remember when I wrote that original story, I said I was pretty sure that no school year had more school closings than 2019-2020. I remember someone told me I might be wrong and suggested that I hadn't done a comprehensive search (I worked on that research for years).
Well, it seems the CDC did a comprehensive search - and it's not even close. 2019-2020 produced more school closings by some number of standard deviations from the mean. (I would report that standard deviation if I knew how to calculate it!)
I'm actually reading one of Ed Dowd's books on excess deaths. He reports that the number of excess deaths in the middle of 2021 (post-vaccine) was up 40 percent for working people 18 to 64. He said a "10 percent increase" would be a "once-in-200 years anomaly." But the increase was 40 percent!
The increase in school closings compared to the numbers from the previous eight years was .... + 285 percent! I would say that qualifies as "statistically significant."
Bill - Ed Dowd’s book, Cause Unknown is how I woke up my cousin. He shot the messenger though because he never contacts me anymore. 😢
Gave the book to one of my besties. She thanked me for the birthday gifts also contained in the shipment, but never mentioned receiving the book 😢
I'm really enjoying the book. I might review it or run some excerpts. It is a great one to give to people but, as you found out, someone might shoot the messenger.
In my experience most people do shoot the messenger. That said, that's a "wake up book" if there ever was one. I can't say I haven't, oh oops, left behind my copy of Dowd's book in various public places.
I think the word “expert” gets overplayed. The word sounds as if it’s about people that know what they’re talking about. Except in most cases that’s incorrect. Take medicine for example, considered health experts yet can’t cure a thing. Listed by Google as the third leading killer of all Americans but really the first and called experts. I think they’ve tried to have us believe we are stupid but in reality they are like most of the straight A kids from school with no common sense. Great job Bill!
I think you're right. The silver lining of the COVID insanity is the "experts" and "authorities" have lost a lot of the luster they never deserved in the first place. I've read numerous times, as you seem to have, that it's using a narrow definition of medical-caused death to come up with it being the third leading cause. An honest assessment places it at #1. I dunno for sure, but considering how many people I know they've killed, I'm going with #1.
I recently saw an article abstracted in a SubStack that gave evidence that regular flu shots increase the risk of developing flu or flu severity, which is consistent with the data & basic science about the effect of repeated COVID vaccinations increasing the risk & severity of COVID & also with the problems with developing a vaccine for Dengue fever in that the failed vaccine candidates routinely made the vaccinated people significantly sicker when they got their next case of dengue. Also dengue fever is most or more severe when people get it a subsequent time, not the first time. This is consistent with the observation that often the symptoms of many infections are more from the body’s reaction to the infection rather than the effects of the pathogen. (Not at all saying that it would be better if we didn’t have immune system response to invading pathogens, so don’t misunderstand or misquote me—rather that more often than we would like to think, we doctors don’t understand or know what we are doing.
My "Spider Sense" tells me the flu shots are a hidden/unreported or never-investigated scandal in the whole "Covid story."
My working theory is that a very large number of people who became sick with ILI or respiratory symptoms in the second year of Covid (from the fall of 2020 to early 2021) probably had received that year's flu shot.
That's why these people went to the doctor or the hospital. Once in the hospital, the Covid protocols probably killed most of them. But the flu shot might have been the triggering event?
The same thing could have happened in 2019-2020. However, we didn't have the huge spike of deaths in November 2019-February 2020 that we did the next year.
I don't think Covid suddenly became deadly in its SECOND year. I also think large percentages of people had already been exposed to the virus and thus should have had natural immunity.
I wish someone smarter than me would do some kind of study, but this isn't going to happen. What if the flu shots were a massive killer?
Bill, as a young medical student and after I drank the kool aide and got my yearly flu shot. As a healthy young adult, I never missed a single day of class or clinical rotation or work, but I was guaranteed to have at least 2 two week episodes of respiratory illnesses each year. I wrote it off to insufficient hand hygiene, but I now wonder. The episodes didn’t get any milder or less frequent.
Since COVID & after initial 3 shots, I quit all vaxxes (I will get my oral typhoid vaccine before I go overseas this fall, as it is due. & typhoid would be most inconvenient in a third world country), but I have not gotten sick since (now, I also was forced to retire as I was a COVID renegade DOCTOR and they couldn’t have that!—but I also have not been a hermit either.
It would be interesting to see if the flu shot compliant healthcare workers were more or less likely to miss time from work. It wouldn’t be an impossible study to do.
Great idea for a study, Roger.
I’ve had four flu shots in my life. Each time I became ill for 3-5 days immediately following the shot, and within a couple of months, I got the flu and was down for 2 weeks. I haven’t gotten a flu shot for over a decade, and I haven’t had the flu. I also passed on the Covid shot. I’ve had Covid twice, relatively short recovery times. The second time was more like a mild cold. Sooooo….I’m a BIG BELIEVER in passing on the flu shots. They act like flu magnets.
As a school principal, I watched every single child and teacher who received the magical combo shot this season get the flu, followed by Covid, followed by respiratory infections. It wasn’t unusual for kids to be out 3-4 weeks at a time, and teachers up to two. SMH.
Wow that is a powerful and provocative anecdote about your school.
More confirmation of what I am thinking
Did anyone ever think that “Covid” was just the flu rebranded? Your article provides more evidence to me that this was the case. A complete Psy-Op from start to finish.
That's a possibility. Maybe the flu shots made huge numbers of people sick? Something has to explain why significantly more people became sick this flu season. I got sick and so did my two kids and we didn't get that year's flu shot. However, Freedom Fox and others tell me that people who got the flu shot can "shed virus" and cause people who didn't get the shot to also become sick.
For now, though, based on all the stories I've read of people like Ralph Baric messing around with coronaviruses in a lab - and many stories of strange "early outbreaks" (like in nursing homes in Virginia and in other places and vaping illnesses), I'm inclined to think that some kind of more contagious virus did "escape" or was released from a lab.
However, it can't be ruled out that the flu shots might have been the mechanism that made so many more people get sick.
I personally only knew three people who "died from Covid." They were all three ladies, age 70, 80 and 81. All three got sick around November 2020 (the second year of Covid). Then they had long hospital stays and ended up dying. I haven't confirmed this, but I strongly suspect all three had recently received that year's flu vaccine.
This is a strong argument, yet it seems like the first half of a thesis. That is, the opportunity for TPTB to pull off a planned "pandemic" and push the pre-planned response depended upon right timing. Not giving attention to the early spread allowed them a chance to overstate the potential severity of the virus in its impact on children, and to argue against natural immunity, as there was no contradicting body of data if you start the clock later. Most especially this kept the way clear to declare the need for countermeasures (which had already been in the works for a decade, based on CDC patents for COVID tests that were issued in 2002, research by Martin). One might include in this essay the timing of the travel of infected participants from the military games held in China, and their apparent encouragement to their own citizens (many of whom were infected) to travel around the world and share "the wealth." All of these inconvenient aspects of the first act of The Play were swept under the rug by the dearth of media attention.
Thanks for this ... That is my thesis as I've tried to state in previous articles. There has to be some REASON pandemic planners wanted to "date" the start of spread as being mid-December 2019 in Wuhan. Early cases - if "confirmed" - blow up that whole plan or "official narrative" as huge numbers of early cases would show: A) No NPIs designed to "slow" spread could possibly work and B) This virus clearly wasn't "deadly" or we would have all noticed a huge spike in all-cause mortality well before the lockdown dates.
I think "school closings" are THE best metric/evidence that "something different" was happening.
Furthermore, if this was a lab-created novel virus, it DID make millions of people "sick;" but almost everyone survived these common bouts of illness. Personally, I don't think this is that surprising as corona viruses or "flu bugs" don't typically kill many people. That is, this is what you might expect.
My conjecture/thesis: Is the "mad scientists" created a very contagious virus (and I've presented copious evidence to support this theory), but not a "deadly" virus.
I continue to say: "Count the sick people." Were more people becoming sick than normal? My answer: Yes.
FWIW, the CDC produces "flu case" estimates throughout a given flu season. Early in the flu season of 2019-2020, these estimates said this season was shaping up to be one of the most severe and widespread in decades. (I've documented this with contemporaneous ILI reports and media reports).
However, a couple months after "Covid," they "revised" their estimates so the actual revised numbers were BELOW the low-end range they had earlier reported.
The 2019-2020 flu season became almost "normal" compared to previous flu seasons. This revised estimate flies in the face of the story I just reported and, now this CDC paper. How could you have a "normal" flu season that caused almost 3,000 schools in America to close? - 900 more schools than closed in the 2017-2018 flu season, said to be the worst in 40 years?
I missed the earlier chapters. Thanks for gracefully bringing me up to speed. I admire your way of going about it. It's ironic that this was apparently planned so far in advance, and yet uncontrollable factors threatened to disrupt the script. And...as TPTB tend to reuse patterns they like, it also gives us something to monitor in the future. You know, just in case....
Bill great work DOJ needs to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate the Covid debacle and fund it with the resources needed.
Unfortunately the perpetrators investigating themselves yields very little justice…..maybe just-us!
This is a great piece of work, Bill! And excellent documentation of that work.
Thank you, Paul.
There is no proof whatsoever that schools closed due to 'Covid-19'.
Off the top my head, I van think of other causes:
When did the schools close in relation to the distribution of the annual flu shot? Vials of the 2019-2020 annual influenza vaccines were inspected under a microscope and found to contain the same unusual particles as inspected vials of Covid vaccines.
Were there any new vaccines distributed to school age children in 2019? Was there a push for more children to get an existing vaccine?
Were any agents sprayed in the atmosphere during 2019 (for whatever reason) that could have at caused respiratory or other illness in the population in general or in children (who are more sensitive to particulates than adults)?
Are there records of increases in medical illnesses in adults during the same period as the increase of school closings? If so, what made them ill?
Was there an increase of operational 5G cells towers in 2019?
What are the illnesses that closed schools?
Yes on records of illnesses that made large numbers of adults sick pre-COVID. See my article on “ili tells the tale” and the story on the increase in the number of flu tests given.
Bravo!
This is certainly an interesting observation, I remember you writing about it before. I always look critically at any theory, as one of the best ways to validate a theory is to try like heck to disprove it, and not be able. My first thought was my remembrance was school-age children were so little affected by the alpha/Wuhan strain that it would not have caused as much absenteeism as flu outbreaks. My memory is not perfect, so I asked Grok, and he said:
"You're correct that the original COVID-19 strain (often referred to as the Wuhan or ancestral strain, sometimes later classified as Alpha in the context of variants) generally caused milder illness in school-age children (roughly 5–18 years old) compared to typical seasonal influenza"
Further along, Grok said:
"Seasonal influenza tends to affect school-age children more noticeably than the original COVID-19 strain"
So just another factor to throw into the assessment of what was going on. It would be interesting to know if a lot of the closures were due to sick teachers, rather than sick students. I know a lot of adults who were pretty sick with something weird that winter and figure it was COVID. But kids, maybe, not so much. Of course, Grok isn't perfect. He's pretty good on questions like this though.
In my non expert opinion, the flu shots that are pushed every year weaken people’s immune systems and probably prime them for serious infections like C-19. My husband was strongly encouraged to take a flu shot at work (one of his coworker’s wife was a nurse who administered the jabs in his office) in late 2018 which brought on a severe allergic reaction (hives all over his body). The next year in December 2019, he was very sick with a flu-like illness, losing his sense of smell, which still hasn’t returned. I had a milder version of it in mid January 2020. That nurse, by the way, was pushing the Covid jabs too, which my husband declined, and he heard that she now has all sorts of medical issues.
Thanks for sharing. To be clear, Your husband got the flu jab in December 2019 and then got sick and you did the same in January 2020?
I've also read that the composition of the flu shot changed significantly in 2019-2020 and maybe in the fall of 2020 as well.
Columbo or Sherlock Holmes would be investigating the flu shot(s).
Hubby got the flu jab in late 2018. He had some kind of pretty severe ILI in December 2019, and I had a milder version in January 2020. We both lost our sense of smell. I recovered mine after about six months. He still can’t smell anything. Something in the flu jab he received caused a severe allergic reaction. Neither of us got any jabs after that.
I also added Kansas to my list of states that had at least one school closing (see below, probably “several”) systems. This tidbit was different as it reported a school closing not due to the number of sick students but because one school employee in Kansas had died from “Influenza B.”
An intriguing bit of info I just found ....
Facebook post (Feb. 12, 2020) from the central office of a school district in Kansas: “As most of you know, our paraprofessional at Park Elementary, Kayauna, passed away on Sunday. Last night we learned that her brother is in intensive care for similar symptoms. The only confirmed diagnosis for each of them at this point is influenza type b. A disease specialist is further investigating any underlying causes of their illness. Being that this can take 48 hours to get results back, we will be closing all schools for Thursday and Friday to ensure that we are taking the proper steps to keep our students safe and protected.”
The paralegal who died was only 20, and you almost never hear of anyone age 20 dying “from the flu.” (I wonder if this was a severe case of Covid?)
AI Overview when I typed in “School closings in Oklahoma and Kansas in January 2020”: “In total, the flu has hit Oklahoma particularly hard this year. According to the Centers for Disease control, Oklahoma is marked as one of the high activity states for the flu, along with neighboring states like Kansas and Texas.”
Seiling Public Schools closes Jan. 15, 2020:
News 9 TV report: "In total, the flu has hit Oklahoma particularly hard this year. According to the Centers for Disease control, Oklahoma is marked as one of the high activity states for the flu, along with neighboring states like Kansas and Texas.”
Google AI’s summary to my query also said that “several localized school closings” had happened in Kansas in 2020, but the only district it specifically cited was the school district where the paralegal died.
Final tidbit of Bonus Content (I added about 12 schools to my original list) including this school system in Arkansas ...
Jan. 31 (2020) - JONESBORO, Ark. (KAIT) - Illness has caused several area schools to cancel classes for either later this week or early next week.
On Friday, Newport Special School District announced it would dismiss classes at 1:30 p.m. and take an AMI day on Monday, Feb. 3, due to student and staff illness. While everyone is away, workers will disinfect the schools.
Newport Superintendent Brett Bunch says there’s no question to it this comes down to straight illness.
“We had a revolving door at our nurse’s office; 20 percent of our student’s population gone," Bunch said.
I find a quote like this in EVERY "flu story" I read:
"A Newport Nurse Practitioner, Vanessa Falwell says her office has been filled and they have seen several upper-respiratory infections. She even added that its not to late to get your flu shot ..."
My comment: Yeah, that flu shot worked great in 2020 ... but it's not too late to go get the flu shot that didn't work.
Bonus content 3 - documenting teacher absenteeism in one TN school district:
"On average, Knox schools have 377 absences per day that require a substitute, Bolton said. In contrast, there were around 600 teacher absences on one of the days before Knox schools closed in January (2020) ..."
My math: 223 more teacher absences in January than usual = an increase of 59.15 percent absenteeism rate.
Bonus Text 2:
Note: 265,546 more flu tests were administered in the flu season of 2019-2020 than in the previous flu season (which was also a “bad” flu season). This is an increase of 34 percent in one year. Data from Week 40 to Week 14 based on clinics and hospitals that are a part of the Flu Surveillance System (not all clinics).
Question: Why were so many people going to the doctor and getting flu tests?
I also should note that the vast majority of people who get a flu test actually test negative for Influenza. This was the case in Troy in December 2019 and January 2020, where a local medical clinic administrator told me almost everyone who got a flu test was testing negative, prompting doctors, nurses and administrators to wonder (direct quote): "We thought something was wrong with the flu tests."
Note the same thing happened in one Tennessee County:
"During the week when many East Tennessee school districts closed, 10 percent of patients tested positive for flu at designated Tennessee clinics. That was one of the highest rates in the Southeast. However, Knoxville’s reported flu rate was less than half that -- and schools still closed for three days.
"Only 5 percent tested positive for flu and schools were still closed for three days."
From my original article, new text I added:
Hardeman County Schools (TN):
“… The district says 462 students were absent Wednesday out of the 1,286 students enrolled. That’s up from 385 the day before. The district saying many absences were due to flu or flu-like symptoms.
Note: 462 students absent out of 1,286 enrolled = 35.93 percent of students absent.
Editorial comment: That's a "contagious" virus (or, for those who don't believe in contagious viruses, a "contagious something.")