Bill Maher is right: Policies, not the pandemic, hurt children’s development

WATCH: BILL MAHER CLAIMS ‘THE WAY WE HANDLED THE PANDEMIC’ CAUSED COLLATERAL DAMAGE

“This pisses me off,” Maher said. “The pandemic didn’t do that. The way we handled the pandemic did that. It was not written in stone that we had to handle it the way we did.”

As someone who attended college during the pandemic, I can attest that not only were students robbed of social interaction, but they were robbed of a quality education because many professors were unprepared to teach their courses remotely and a number of institutions implemented pass/fail grading, which only required students to achieve a 70% or better to be awarded the equivalent of an A. Sending these students into the workforce in an economy broken by leftist lockdown policies is a recipe for disaster.

In 2020, schools and businesses were shut down, mask and vaccine mandates were enforced, and stay-at-home orders were enacted in an effort to slow the spread of the virus. Maher listed a litany of consequences following these policies. These include ACT scores at a 30-year low, rates of anxiety and depression rising, the body mass index increase doubling for children ages 2-19, drug overdose deaths, murders, and domestic violence increasing, and inflation at a 40-year high.

Maher added that car crashes have increased as well, noting, “The experts said, ‘You know what it is? People just went f***ing mental.'”

The Washington Examiner previously reported on a 2022 Johns Hopkins University study that concurs with Maher’s position. According to the researchers, COVID-19 lockdowns had “little to no effect” on the COVID-19 mortality rate and “should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy.”

“We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality,” they concluded in their meta-analysis of 34 studies from the first wave of the pandemic.

Instead, the researchers cited “devastating effects” of the lockdown policies, noting that “they have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy.”

The Washington Examiner also reported on a study promoted by the American Academy of Pediatrics that assessed how the cancellation of youth sports affected adolescent athletes. The study concluded that these policies were “accompanied by decreased physical activity and quality of life, as well as startlingly high levels of anxiety and depression.”

During the exchange, deGrasse Tyson chimed in to defend the lockdown policies, saying, “We don’t have benefit of the alternative scenarios to see how they would have come out to be able to judge whether what did happen was a lesser evil than other options that would have unfolded.”

Maher pushed back, “Actually we do because other countries handled it differently,” and he affirmed that “some of the countries with the lowest vaccination rates turned out to have the best results.”

Smerconish described the “blowback” that ensued during the pandemic whenever guests would appear on his CNN show and expressed similar criticisms, which would later be vindicated.

He noted that his own children, for whom he is still paying tuition, were “so robbed of a year, year and a half, of all the exchange, the mingling” they would have had in college if campus hadn’t been shut down. “We’re never gonna make that time up,” he said.

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Peter Cordi (@PeterCordi) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog and was a college student during the pandemic lockdowns.