Consent

This week the testers came to my school. I saw them, and I could use a test. I asked for one. Nope – I had not given consent. Well look, when I say “please test me” that is consent. When I say “I consent to be tested” that is consent.

But that’s not what the Department of Education means. For them, there are two objectives – limiting the number of positive tests, and limiting the number of tests, period. They completely canceled testing of staff, then relented. But when they relented, they required “C*NS3NT” – some bastardized from of “consent.” Department of Education C*NS3NT is not designed to see whether or not staff give consent – it is designed to be a bureaucratic obstacle. It is designed to stop staff who want to be tested from being tested.

In their drive to keep schools open (which is not yet seriously threatened, and may not be seriously threatened, let’s see how o-micron hits) the Department of Education treats testing as a problem. Canceling tests for teachers was too much? So they allow testing, but put teachers through hoops.

This began long ago. Testing for COVID in our schools was political from day 1. Testing was expensive and organizing it was tricky way back in August 2020. So testing proponents (Mulgrew) asked experts to come up with a number that workable. The DoE immediately pushed back – not 20%, but 10%.

If someone didn’t want to be tested, they didn’t have to be. No random sampling. They intentionally sampled a population that believed it was not sick, and got predictably low numbers. And they compared those low numbers to samples of people out of schools who got tested because they thought they WERE sick. The results – more people who thought they were sick really turned out to be sick than students who thought they were not sick – were predictable.

Then vaccines came, and the DoE said, we do not test vaccinated students. Then breakthrough infections happened, and the DoE did not test, by policy, those susceptible to breakthroughs. This fall the DoE stopped testing students with one dose – incompletely vaccinated.

Testing in schools has been used for a year and a half to push a political agenda. Keep schools open, test healthy students to keep positivity rates low, not test those susceptible to breakthroughs. And now, to make it difficult for people who just want to be tested to actually get a test.