Thread by @Lylamehta

Schools return soon. The European CDC & US CDC have suggested enhanced mitigations in schools due to the delta variant but the UK is going the opposite way. Why this British exceptionalism again @10DowningStreet @GavinWilliamson @CMO_England @educationgovuk? Thread 1/

So many kids around the world have missed almost 1.5 years of in-person school with terrible consequences. I’m grateful that my daughter has been in class half the time. But the lack of attention to school safety in the UK has been v troubling for me as a parent & academic. 2/

In May, masks were dropped in secondary schools. In July, infections were out of control & almost a million kids were out of school. The UK is currently an outlier amongst high income countries by not vaccinating kids under 16. Come Sept, all mitigations like masks, bubbles 3/

& contact tracing will stop. The measures had limitations, but removing all of them is so reckless. Pandemic mismanagement has already led to the Alpha & #JohnsonVariant. What happens when the virus is allowed to rip in a partially vaccinated population? 4/

Govt advisers claim e.g @ShamezLadhani that children are at low risk & that schools are not hubs of transmission. As @chrischirp @dgurdasani etc. have argued @PHE_uk seems to frame & cheery-pick data in particular ways in order to justify certain outcomes. What abt #LongCovid?

Those who say that it’s better to vaccinate people in low income countries rather than kids are ignoring the fact that wealthy countries have hoarded the vaccine in deeply selfish & criminal ways. Vaccinating kids & global vaccine equity are not mutually exclusive. 5/

So why has the UK not decided to vaccinate the under 16 year olds? Why has the UK been so late to look into ventilation systems, now rolled out in schools in other countries? Why was the UK so slow to accept masks as a mitigation strategy in schools & now again rejects them? 6/

So much of the UK’s decision-making re: covid appears to be ideological rather than scientific (i.e. libertarian/exceptionalist). A small but vocal minority who believe that mitigations restrict ‘freedoms’ have managed to influence policy & outcomes in dangerous ways. 7/

But given the massive uncertainties around a novel virus, isn’t it better to be iterative, adaptive, learn from past mistakes & other countries’ experiences? All these have been sorely missing from the start, e.g. around testing, masks etc. We are now at 100 deaths a day. 8/

@CMO_England on advantages of people getting sick/dying in the summer rather than in winter. Why does a rich country with some of the world’s best public health experts normalise so many infections, deaths & #LongCovid daily amidst “vaccine success”?

It’s time to stop this terrible experiment on people, kids & schools. Thanks to @SafeEdForAll_UK @Parents_Utd @OneVoice_Group @karamballes @chrischirp @dgurdasani @adamhamdy @MartinRemains @GYamey etc. for campaigning/ writing about covid, kids & #MakeSchoolsSafe END

Sincere apologies I meant @dgurdasani1 here and earlier on this thread. Thanks to her for the great work & persistence & also to @ProfColinDavis @optimismworks00 @SurajitStat @GabrielScally who have been tweeting actively on these issues