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I'm indebted to @GrayD001 and @karamballes for pointing out something astonishingly profound in this image.
I think this is *phenomenally important*...
I think this may be one of the most important threads I've ever written. 

So I had kind of noticed it from the other way round... but then they both said something that flipped the whole thing on its head.

I've written a couple of threads about these rates of absence for students in England, and there are other important things to get from the image... but look at 2020/2021.
That's the school year that runs from September 2020 to July 2021. 

You can see, can't you, that there's no increase of absence in secondary and primary schools in 20/21... but there is a massive increase in the special educational needs schools. 

Now the reason for this, I think, is that Secondary and Primary schools had a host of measures in place to reduce infection between September 2020 and July 2021.

So much so that RSV, Flu, Norovirus, Shigella, Mycoplasma Pneumoniae, Strep A, Whooping Cough, Measles... they were all reduced to a tiny fraction of the normal number of cases.

So while the absence in these years was caused by all the above illnesses... 

The absence in this year... marked in red... was *almost all covid*. 

Look at Shigella... one of those classic ones that can cause kids to poop out of every possible orifice... 

The classics were all suppressed and repressed in Secondary and Primary schools that year... so all of this sickness absence here 👇 is Covid. 

But *many of those mitigations to suppress Covid* **were not in place in special schools**.

So they were hit in 2020/2021. 

It's obvious.
In 2020/2021, all those other infections were being suppressed by the mitigations against Covid... but Covid was causing all this absence. And Special Schools got hit hard. 

So that's all interesting, but we're now coming to the important part of the thread... (for which I'm indebted to @GrayD001 and @karamballes)

Now... the liars claim that this absence here is the damage left by lockdowns. 

"Look," they say, "the absence doesn't start until 2021/2022! That's after the pandemic was over!! It's caused by the lockdowns in 2020/2021!!"

They're liars, so, of course, they're lying, but it's a clever lie. 

But there's that detail on there which *proves* it's a lie.

The increase in absence in Special Needs schools doesn't follow after "a year of lockdown".

It's already happening in 2020/2021. 

Because all these increases are driven by illness.
They're *not driven by lockdowns*. 

I mean, we know that, but it's such a simple lie that it's hard to argue against it.

It's almost impervious to argument through the use of data...

The increase isn't caused by lockdown.
It's caused by infection.

Remember the key quote from the Department for Education report that this data comes from?

"The majority of absence was due to illness"

Did Special Schools in England secretly have a year of lockdown in 2019 that they didn't tell us about?