But It Does Not Effect Kids!

I am, of course, referring to Covid, and the claim the it does not effect children is a lie.

Children are getting sick once or twice a year, and prospect of long disabilities is mind boggling:

Since the COVID pandemic began, claims that the disease poses only minimal risk to children have spread widely, on the presumption that the lower rate of severe acute illness in kids tells the whole story. Notions that children are nearly immune to COVID and don’t need to be vaccinated have pervaded.

These ideas are wrong. People making such claims ignore the accumulating risk of long COVID, the constellation of long-term health effects caused by infection, in children who may get infected once or twice a year. The condition may already have affected nearly six million kids in the U.S. Children need us to wake up to this serious threat. If we do, we can help our kids with a few straightforward and effective measures.

The spread of the mistaken idea that children have nothing to worry about has had some help from scientists. In 2023 the American Medical Association’s pediatrics journal published a study–which has since been retracted—reporting the rate of long COVID symptoms in kids was “strikingly low” at only 0.4 percent. The results were widely publicized as feel-good news, and helped rationalize the status quo, where kids are repeatedly exposed to SARS-COV-2 in underventilated schools and parents believe they will suffer no serious harm.

As an aside, even if this were true, the parents would be getting sick from their kids, and they would be suffering severe illness, disability, and possible death.

In January 2024, however, two scientists published a letter with me explaining why that study was invalid. Some of the errors made it hard to understand how the study survived peer review. For example, the authors claimed to report on long COVID using the 2021 World Health Organization definition, but didn’t properly account for the possibility of new onset and fluctuating or relapsing symptoms, even though that definition and the subsequently released 2023 pediatric one emphasize those attributes. Any child with four symptom-free weeks—even nonconsecutive ones—following confirmed infection was categorized by the study authors as not having long COVID.

In August, the authors of the study retracted it. They did not admit to the errors we raised. But they did admit to new errors, and said these mistakes meant they understated the rate of affected children.

This was deliberate Great Barrington declaration deception, just like the anti-masking humbuggery that was done at the Cochrane Review. 

In reality, the occurrence of Long Covid in youth is pretty firmly in the double digit percentages.

There is an entire extremely well-paid industry dedicated to peddling this anti-vax/anti-mask/anti-public health bullsh%$.

Billionaires who don't care that their workers die pay good money for this sort of crap.