COVID-19 and the Failure of America’s Major Religions - Dennis Prager

[Geee]

American Greatness

Churches and synagogues will pay a price as people will gradually come to understand how weak their religious leaders were. Many of their congregants simply may not return.

For two years, Americans have been partially or entirely deprived of fundamental freedoms—of assembly, speech, religious liberty, making a living, a child’s right to an education, access to early treatment for a potentially deadly virus, and more—for the first time in American history. That half of America, especially its elites, has either made peace with or supported these deprivations of freedom is why many of us worry about America’s future as a free society.

Even more concerning has been the reactions of America’s great religions—specifically, Catholics, Protestants, Mormons (Latter-Day Saints) and Jews. The government issued irrational (as well as anti-religious and unethical) edicts and nearly every church and synagogue obeyed.

These churches and synagogues closed their schools to in-classroom instruction despite the fact that COVID-19 presented virtually no threat to young people. Vastly more children have been hurt by closing religious and secular schools and, later, by making children wear masks—even outdoors—than by COVID-19. This has been made clear not only by relevant data in America but by Sweden, which never closed its schools for children under 16 — and not a single student or teacher died from COVID-19.

 

As Swedish physicians wrote in a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine in February 2021:

Despite Sweden’s having kept schools and preschools open, we found a low incidence of severe Covid-19 among schoolchildren and children of preschool age during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Among the 1.95 million children who were 1 to 16 years of age, 15 children had Covid-19, MIS-C, or both conditions and were admitted to an ICU, which is equal to 1 child in 130,000 . . . No child with Covid-19 died.