GOP candidate wants kids back in school just like in the 'pre vaccine era'

[crickets]

17. What I'm getting from these politicians is that

it's not their children who would be sitting in a classroom petri dish all day, exposing all of the adults around them, not their kids who will bring those germs home to them and all of their family and all whom they come into contact with, not their kids who will make it impossible for anyone with compromised immunity to shelter in place if they share a home with children, and not their kids who might be in the small percentage who will die if they come down with this illness. These are all other people's kids they are talking about as though they are abstract ideas, not living, breathing people.

There are children who, if they stay home from school, will live. If they go to school, some will die.

Parents who find their kids so inconvenient, who so want their kids out of the house for a while that they are willing to take the chance of letting them die are complete ciphers to me. Of course everybody wants their kids back in school, but let's have that school experience be safe for them. Right now, it is not safe.

When I was a kid no one supervised us for the majority of the day spent out of school. I walked into an unlocked house in the afternoon and had a snack, grabbed the bike and ran around the neighborhood and surrounding woods getting into all sorts of things I shouldn't have. Luckily, there were tetanus shots to make sure random scrapes and rusty nails didn't kill me, and every other vaccination I needed, I had. If you think the eighties were a free for all for kids, the sixties put that in the shade. We didn't even have seat belts. *waves cane*

Today no one would think of leaving the doors unlocked, just as we wouldn't think of having unprotected sex in an era of AIDS, as a society we are a little more wary of the sad fact of kidnappings, and we don't send kids to school without all of their vaccinations.

There is no vaccine for COVID-19. There isn't even an overarching prescribed treatment for the virus right now, because it isn't fully understood yet. Keeping kids home from school during a pandemic isn't "sheltering them from everything in the world," it's just exercising common sense so they don't get needlessly killed.