Kelly’s Eye
WE ARE coming to rely on redoubtable bestselling women authors to provide us with home truths. First there was JK Rowling’s stance on biological sex, which until recently would scarcely have caused a ripple of attention, not least because no one would have thought it required asserting.Yet for her pains, Rowling is now by turns demonised and deserted – which must come especially hard from those wretched little ingrates who owe their gilded existences to starring in the film versions of her books.
Let’s hope the same fate doesn’t befall Julia Donaldson, creator of The Gruffalo, and other excellent stories (fondly remembered from our family’s bedtime reading once upon a time), for condemning the reintroduction of masks in schools as “alien”. Donaldson says: “Children are children for such a short time – I don’t think they should be sacrificed like this. Masks are seen as a gesture that isn’t costing the Government any money and as something that is not doing any harm.
“Because of the climate of fear, people have readily accepted something I regard as unacceptable, and that I fear may now be seen as a normal part of life.”
Hers is a refreshing blast of common sense, and reinforced by Professor Mark Woolhouse, an Edinburgh epidemiologist. Confronting the specious nonsense repeatedly claimed that we are all equally at risk, he says: “People over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15.”
Yet, as Woolhouse says: “We did serious harm to our children and young adults who were robbed of their education, jobs and normal existence, as well as suffering damage to their future prospects, while they were left to inherit a record-breaking mountain of public debt.
“We were mesmerised by the once-in-a-century scale of the emergency and succeeded only in making a crisis even worse. In short, we panicked.This was an epidemic crying out for a precision public health approach and it got the opposite.”
Recent reports suggest that many pupils are refusing to wear their masks as ordered. Good on them.