As someone who has been following the antivaccine movement for over twenty years (and blogging about it for over 18 years), before the pandemic I never thought I would see my “provaccine” colleagues claim that children don’t need to be vaccinated against an infectious disease that kills at least as many children as measles did in the days before there was a vaccine. Indeed, that is basically the entire message behind the “Urgency of Normal” movement promoting a message during the Delta wave claiming that masks and COVID-19 mitigations in schools were not necessary because so few children die of the diseases, a state public health authority actively discouraging parents from vaccinating their children against COVID-19, and academics even recycling hoary old antivax tropes in a bioethics journal to argue against the need to vaccinate children against COVID-19. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, as I’ve been reminding my colleagues who are shocked at how many doctors are antivaccine that such antivax docs have always been among us, but the intensity and degree of the pushback among colleagues against vaccinating children against COVID-19 and their utter obliviousness that the arguments they were making were nothing more than old antivax arguments indistinguishable from the arguments antivaxxers used to make about measles vaccines surprised even me. What particularly surprised and disappointed me is the degree to which seemingly eminent academic physicians, while showing concern about reports of myocarditis after vaccination, seemingly shrug their shoulders about the disease, thinking it seemingly “natural and healthy” for children to die of a vaccine-preventable disease. They even argue, as antivaxxers did prepandemic for measles and chickenpox “parties,” that we should let children catch Omicron rather than impose anything resembling pandemic restrictions like masking or vaccine mandates in a school ever again.
For example, Drs. Vinay Prasad and Allison Krug actually argued:
When it comes to infectious disease, normality means a world where they are routinely exposed to, and overcome, viral illness. For children, getting sick and recovering is part of a natural and healthy life.
As Dr. Jonathan Howard put it, the idea that vaccine-preventable diseases are healthy for children is an old anti-vaccine trope. So is this other statement by Drs. Prasad and Krug:
While the death of any child is a tragedy, Covid-19 is less deadly to children than many other risks we accept as a matter of course, including drowning, vehicle accidents, and even cardiovascular disease.
Well do I remember antivaxxers lamenting with ever-so-serious faux sorrow the deaths of children from, say, measles or Haemophilus influenza, but then quickly adding that the chances of this happening are so low that vaccines aren’t needed, or, as Drs. Prasad and Krug put it, COVID-19 should just be a risk that we accept “as a matter of course.” These “not antivax” doctors routinely take severe umbrage when it is pointed out to them that they are using exactly the same arguments that antivaxxers used to use before the pandemic for vaccines such as the MMR and pertussis vaccines, but they are, no matter how much these “not antivax” docs try to claim COVID-19 is different.
Whenever I hear arguments like theirs, I like to point out that children shouldn’t die and that, by and large, they don’t die at anywhere the same frequency as adults and old people. At least, they don’t now, given that the vaccine-preventable diseases that used to kill large numbers of children have been controlled. In other words, we correctly expect that the number of children who die of any cause every year should be small and quite rightly do not tolerate the preventable deaths of children. (At least, we didn’t until 2021 or so, when we saw the rise of physicians with a seeming—shall we say?—nonchalance to the deaths of children on media, both old and new, particularly on social media.
This brings me to a bit of data, specifically a study that was published a week ago in JAMA Network Open, Assessment of COVID-19 as the Underlying Cause of Death Among Children and Young People Aged 0 to 19 Years in the US. Let’s just say that, as Dr. Howard and I (and many others) have been arguing all along, COVID-19 is at least a comparable threat to children as any other prepandemic vaccine-preventable child infectious disease. The study, by an international group of investigators, led by researchers at the University of Oxford’s Department of Computer Science investigated COVID-19 mortality among children and young people (CYP) aged 0-19 using data from US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention databases. Specifically, they used data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wide-Ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (WONDER) database on underlying cause of death in the US to identify the ranking of COVID-19 relative to other causes of death among children and young people from birth to age 19. COVID-19 deaths were examined in 12-month periods between April 1, 2020, and August 31, 2022, compared with deaths from leading non–COVID-19 causes in 2019, 2020, and 2021.
I’m just going to go straight to the bottom line here:
There were 821 COVID-19 deaths among individuals aged 0 to 19 years during the study period, resulting in a crude death rate of 1.0 per 100 000 population overall; 4.3 per 100 000 for those younger than 1 year; 0.6 per 100 000 for those aged 1 to 4 years; 0.4 per 100 000 for those aged 5 to 9 years; 0.5 per 100 000 for those aged 10 to 14 years; and 1.8 per 100 000 for those aged 15 to 19 years. COVID-19 mortality in the time period of August 1, 2021, to July 31, 2022, was among the 10 leading causes of death in CYP aged 0 to 19 years in the US, ranking eighth among all causes of deaths, fifth in disease-related causes of deaths (excluding unintentional injuries, assault, and suicide), and first in deaths caused by infectious or respiratory diseases when compared with 2019. COVID-19 deaths constituted 2% of all causes of death in this age group.
I can almost hear my “urgency of normal” colleagues twitching and saying, “So what? That’s still a small number of deaths relative to the number of children who have had COVID-19.” Perhaps, but I’ve never found the argument that, hey, it “wasn’t that many dead children” to be a particularly persuasive argument. I’m funny that way. Still, let’s move on to a graphical representation:
Not enough for you? How about this ranking? Notice how the death toll from COVID-19 is comparable to the prepandemic death toll due to heart disease:
Still not enough? Let’s look at infectious diseases alone:
Now let’s let the authors really lay it on the line in blunt terms:
While other causes of death, such as unintentional injuries (18.4%), assault (6.9%), and suicide (6.8%) represented a large percentage of all causes of death, COVID-19 ranked fifth in disease-related causes of deaths (excluding unintentional injuries, assault, and suicide), and first in deaths caused by infectious and respiratory diseases. Comparing deaths from COVID-19 with deaths from other vaccine-preventable diseases historically, COVID-19 caused substantially more deaths (821 deaths in our study period in CYP) than major vaccine-preventable diseases did before vaccines became available: hepatitis A (3 reported deaths in children per year in the US), rotavirus (20-60 reported deaths in children per year in the US), rubella (17 reported deaths in children per year in the US), varicella (50 reported deaths in children per year in the US),15 and measles (495 total reported deaths per year,16 the vast majority in children17).
In summary, we found that COVID-19 is now a leading cause of death for CYP aged 0-19 years in the US, and the top (first) leading cause of death among infectious and respiratory diseases.
Worse, the results of this study likely underestimate the impact of COVID-19 on the health of children. They also likely underestimate the number of deaths attributable to COVID-19, for these reasons:
Our findings need to be considered in the context of several limitations which mean that we may have underestimated the true mortality burden of COVID-19 in CYP aged 0 to 19 years. Analyses of excess deaths have suggested underreporting bias in COVID-19 deaths22; specific criteria for determining COVID-19 deaths is heterogeneous across the US and has changed over time; and delays to reporting may be substantial for recent time periods.14 We consider COVID-19 as an underlying (and not contributing) cause of death only, but COVID-19 amplifies the severe impacts of other diseases, and mortality hazards from coinfection (eg, influenza23) are increased with accompanying comorbidities. The category of deaths from influenza and pneumonia combines a variety of causes, to which SARS-CoV-2 could be a contributing factor.23,24 Recent evidence also suggests that COVID-19 may contribute to serious long-term sequelae25 in children and adolescents, which are unlikely to have been captured in these data.
In a press release, one of the coauthors puts it into proper perspective:
Assistant Professor Robbie M. Parks of Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, a co-author of the study, said: “If you look at infectious diseases in children in the US historically, in the period before vaccines became available, hepatitis A, rotavirus, rubella, and measles were all major causes of death. But when we compared those diseases to COVID-19, we found that COVID-19 caused substantially more deaths in children and young people than those other diseases did before vaccines became available; this demonstrates how seriously we need to take COVID-19 prevention and mitigation measures for the youngest age groups in the US and worldwide.”
I like to compare the death toll from COVID-19 to the death toll attributable to measles before the vaccine to make this point. In the decade before the first measles vaccine was licensed in 1963, measles routinely infected three to four million people, resulting in 400-500 deaths a year. Since the pandemic began, approximately 1,300 children and young people 0-19 years of age have died of COVID-19. That’s under three years, and most of these deaths have occurred during the last two years.
But wait! I can sense “not antivax” doctors saying that there weren’t nearly as many children in 1960 as there are now. Well, yes and no. There were 64.5 million children in the US in 1960. To be precise, I will conceded that the numbers I found aren’t strictly comparable because the old statistics count ages 0-17 as children and don’t go up to 19, but we’re not interested in three decimal point precision but ballpark figures. So, using that same source I find that there were 72.8 million children age 0-17 in the US in 2020. In other words, even adjusted for population growth, the COVID-19 death toll among children now is in the same ballpark as the death toll from measles was in 1960. To put it another way, at best, COVID-19 is roughly as deadly to children as measles was before the vaccine (and that’s even with a percentage of the population ages 0-19 having been vaccinated). More likely, COVID-19 is considerably more deadly to children than measles was in the 1950s, before the vaccine was developed.
Yet back then doctors and scientists considered measles, its status as a “normal childhood illness” notwithstanding, to be a deadly threat that warranted a vaccine—and rightly so! We shouldn’t tolerate 500 children dying every year and something like 1-3 per 1,000 suffering severe neurological sequelae, and in the 1960s we didn’t. The measles vaccine resulted in a dramatic decline in the number of cases of measles per year. In contrast, today a distressing number of physicians just shrug their shoulders metaphorically at an equal or higher level of carnage due to an infectious disease, and trot out the same old antivax arguments used for measles based on COVID-19 supposedly being “not a threat” to children in order to argue against pandemic mitigations in schools or vaccine mandates. And, yes, I’m calling out certain physicians by name, including Drs. Vinay Prasad, Allison Krug, and Tracy Beth Høeg, to begin with, for doing just this.
Let me finish by putting it this way. If you use arguments against vaccinating children against COVID-19 that are in form identical to the arguments that antivaxxers used to use before the pandemic to argue against vaccinating children against measles, pertussis, and the like, namely that the disease isn’t a threat to the children, while ignoring that the disease kills hundreds of children a year, what should I call you? You’ve lost the right to get all indignant if I call you an antivaxxer. If the name fits…
89 replies on “COVID-19 is now a leading killer of children”
How many kids sick with Covid recovered but infected their parents or grandparents who didn’t recover? How many Covid orphans? The deniers prefer to ignore those concerns.
Not sure how many of these cases were caused by the kids bringing the virus home, but a lot of children have lost parents or caregivers.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9749637/#:~:text=We%20estimate%20that%20216%2C617%20U.S.,under%20the%20age%20of%2018.
And just to add to the point, as you know, this is just deaths. Children with newly disabled parents – or children themselves harmed but not killed – are also a cost.
Two days ago I had a patient turn up in clinic now looking to go onto disability for long covid. First time I’d seen that.
Veracity of the claim aside, her lung capacity was still down to quite a degree almost 14 months on.
My bet is that Prasad and Krug (among others*) will, by 2024, also minimize pediatric deaths from other vaccine-preventable diseases (aka measles, pneumonia, meningitis, pertussis). They are too surrounded and embraced by anti-vaxxers not to fall for them.
*-Makary, Battacharya, and Hoeg
Yes, it will definitely happen sooner or later. I like to paraphrase Yoda about docs like these, with antivax views being the Dark Side:
“If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you it will…”
Prasad, Krug, et al are all, by my estimation, roughly halfway through their journey down the dark path of antivax. I can’t recall seeing anyone who’s gone that far down the dark path manage to turn around and come back to the light.
Remember how Dr. Pierre Kory went full-on total antivax before the end of last year:
https://twitter.com/PierreKory/status/1606830449514389505
A positive PCR and subsequent death is all it takes to be counted as a COVID death.
Labarge, this is NOT true. Never has been. I have written covid death certificates. Too many. Thankfully, never one for a child.
You have NO IDEA what a fucking miserable death acute hypoxic respiratory failure is. You come here and make light of it. You throw your bullshit, glib assertions around while having ZERO experience or even clue.
Shame on you man. Seriously. What you are doing is sick.
Birx said it from the get go, as did other health officials. I posted it but it was moderated.
Are you sure? Or is that an opinion? Do you have that written down as the official classification?
Because, otherwise, you’re minimising child deaths to suit your own political agenda.
Any reliable evidence links or do you remain free of such?
Why do you even bother to wear a bike helmet Labarge? Nothing to protect. Not that you care about protecting anyways.
Huh, the same “Fox News” who, in court documents, admitted behind the scenes that all of Trump’s election claims were BS, yet they kept pushing them, because they were afraid of losing their audience.
Birx says government is classifying all deaths of patients with coronavirus as ‘COVID-19’ deaths, regardless of cause
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/birx-says-government-is-classifying-all-deaths-of-patients-with-coronavirus-as-covid-19-deaths-regardless-of-cause
Explore the Fox News apps that are right for you at http://www.foxnews.com/apps-products/index.html.
No. I won’t support people who push racist conspiracies [replacement theory, President Obama isn’t from the US, etc.], lies about problems caused by President Biden when they are things he has no control ever, dismissed the seriousness of the trump supported attack on democracy, etc. It speaks volumes about you that you have no problem with it.
Idw are you a child?
“Idw are you a child?”
No, I just have standards for decency and honesty, things you seem to lack.
@ Labarge
Bullsh*t Mountain? Gimme a break.
Here’s the latest from your favourite reference:
https://www.wonkette.com/boy-those-fox-news-texts-i-don-t-know
Fox has nothing to do with what Birx said. Birx is the source.
@john labarge. I said, read the actual citation. Birx says that some countries(China ?) do not report all COVID deaths, for instance a heart death caused by COVID is not reported, if there were a precondition.
John, John, John, John.
If you bother to remember, people with underlying health issues were most at risk from Covid. Exactly what your first link talks about.
What next John? Old people didn’t die from Covid, it was just old age catching up with them a bit earlier eh?
I never said no one died of covid; I said they over-classified, most likely on purpose in children
@john labarge They are there again, the paranoid passive. Who is over classifying ? Where are guidelines o do ha ?
Now then argie Bargie, you’ve claimed that because.
A: you’ve read that in some online cess pit social media comment
And
B: you actually don’t have a clue what you are talking about.
And he’s quoting an article from early April 2020 for that claim.
A lot of people weren’t even getting tested. And a fair number we’re dying at home because they weren’t considered sick enough to contribute to the jams in the ER’s.
Even Fox News Birx citation is this:
“There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition, and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU [intensive care unit] and then have a heart or kidney problem,” she said during a Tuesday news briefing at the White House. “Some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death.”
“The intent is … if someone dies with COVID-19 we are counting that,”
Read at least the whole articl.
Prasad was already making this sort of comparison with chickenpox in a recent article I read.
Yep. Then he’ll move up to a somewhat more lethal disease like the measles, then to pretty much all childhood diseases. I’m waiting for him to discover how small the percentage of polio cases that are paralytic is.
There seems to a magical thinking assuming that “Covid vaccines” prevent illness and death.
There is no evidence whatsoever that “Covid vaccines” prevent severe illness in small children. For example, according to “VRBPAC briefing document: Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine EUA Amendment for Children 6 months thtough 4 years of age”:
==> “Seven cases in participants 2-4 years of age met the criteria for severe COVID-19: 6 in BNT162b2 group, of which 2 cases occurred post unblinding, and 1 in the placebo group.”
How does the “Covid vaccine” prevent severe illness, again?
Covid vaccine is medical quackery.
Strange then, isn’t it, that vaccinated people are far less likely to die of COVID than the unvaccinated.
You are talking complete and utter horse apples.
@Igor Chudov cited data to support his position. Where’s yours @Julian Frost?
(No fair counting people who have received at least one shot, but not yet enough injections to qualify as “fully vaccinated” among the “unvaccinated”, so make sure to include “partial-vaccination” as a distinct category.)
Later, on the same page cited by Mr. Chudov: “Six participants 2-4 years of age (5 BNT162b2 recipients and 1 placebo recipient) developed
more than one virologically and clinically confirmed episode of symptomatic COVID-19 disease”
So multiple vax recipients caught the disease twice, but only one in the placebo group. That’s strange.
It’s interesting that the table showing Covid-19 as the leading cause of death among respiratory diseases does not indicate a breakdown by “vaccination” status. Surely that information would be relevant before drawing any conclusions concerning mRNA therapy as a viable solution? Working hypothesis: If the briefing document is any indication, adding vax status data would erode the case for child “vaccination” even further.
Chaos, thank you for bringing up a piece of data that I missed!
I am very sorry for the children in the vaccine group who were reinfected repeatedly.
Those multiple reinfections of people whose immunity was disabled by the Covid vaccines, are responsible for the endless waves of Covid that keep on coming, as well as for the late 2022 – early 2023 excess mortality.
by Igor, the master of posting purely unsupportable bullshit.
That does seem to be a talent of his.
“Covid vaccine is medical quackery.” Which one is quackery? All of them? https://covid19.trackvaccines.org/agency/who/
No Igor, not if you understand things and are not predisposed to lying about covid.
Of course, neither you nor john put the time in to try and understand anything, and both of you are very comfortable lying about what data and science say, hence your posts on this thread.
@Igor Chudov – The trial in children was powered to detect a difference in rate of (any symptomatic) clinical infections. Because severe illness is much less common than the overall rate, the study is underpowered for detecting a difference in severe illness. Therefore your comparison is statistically invalid.
On the other hand, it is entirely reasonable to infer that a difference in overall infection rate would translate into a difference in severe infection rate. Should a trial be done to confirm this? My answer is no – such a trial would expose immense numbers of kids to the placebo group, placing them at unnecessary risk.
David, in my own opinion the real purpose of making the trial small was to not detect adverse effects.
The efficacy calculation in the trial was based on SEVEN cases of Covid prior to efficacy data cutoff April 29, 2022: two in the vaccine group and five in the placebo group.
www fda gov/media/159195/download
The signal for “severe Covid cases” (severe effects were monitored for a longer time period past unblinding) was even stronger than “Covid protection” signal for the shorter period, again six in the vaccine group and ONE in the placebo group.
So we have a vaccine that temporarily prevents a few cases of Covid in 2-4 year olds, but caused MORE severe events in the long run.
Any honest regulator presented with these numbers would have laughed Pfizer out of the room. Instead, the FDA rubber stamped the vaccine for small kids.
I am sorry for the children involved. I am somewhat less sorry for the parents, who at this point should know better.
Covid vaccine is medical quackery. I am sorry that you believe promoters of Covid vaccines.
Focusing on limitations of vaccine trial data and ignoring subsequent evidence of vaccine effectiveness is a common antivax tactic, thus Igor’s pretense that Covid vaccines for children lack value.
https://www.popsci.com/health/covid-19-vaccine-children/
One I heard last week in the ER is: “If the vaccines work, why isn’t it gone?” Sigh.
the covid denier’s equivalent of
One level of stupid to fit them all.
Citation:
Preliminary descriptive efficacy analyses of COVID-19 cases occurring at least 7 days post Dose 3 included 376 BNT162b2 recipients and 179 placebo recipients 6-23 months of age and 589 BNT162 recipients and 271 placebo recipients 2-4 years of age. In these analyses, three COVID-19 cases occurred in participants 6-23 months of age, with 1 COVID-19 case in the BNT162b2 group compared to 2 in the placebo group, corresponding to an estimated VE of 75.6% (95% CI: −369.1%, 99.6%), and 7 COVID-19 cases occurred in p articipants 2-4 years of age, with 2 cases in the BNT162b2 group and 5 in the placebo group, corresponding to an estimated VE of 82.4% (95% CI: −7.6%, 98.3%). In a combined analysis of both age groups, VE was 80.4% (95% CI: 14.1%, 96.7%) with 3 cases in the BNT162b2 group and 7 cases in the placebo group.
From
https://www.fda.gov/media/159195/download, Give us an actual citation. My suspicion is that you cannot do division.
Of course only antivaxxers claim COVID vaccines are not vaccines. Gene therapy fix genes,do you get i ?
Hey Igor…fuck you.
We should always keep in mind that many of these causes of death are despite our best efforts to keep children safe. We make seat belts and fences around pools mandatory, we remove children from abusive homes, etc. NOT vaccinating children is the opposite of this.
Yeah, that’s the part that really stuck out to me.
“While the death of any child is a tragedy, Covid-19 is less deadly to children than many other risks we accept as a matter of course, including drowning, vehicle accidents, and even cardiovascular disease.”
I mean…we don’t accept those risks to children as a matter of course? What a truly bizarre statement. Have they never heard of child car seats? We, as a society, have spent decades researching how to keep children safe in vehicles, and implementing that research. We even have gasp GOVERNMENT MANDATES on child safety in vehicles. We have government mandates for manufacturers on seat belts and air bags, which have been modified by further government mandates to make them more child-safe. We have government mandates on individual behavior, with laws on keeping young children in specially designed safety seats when in a motor vehicle. Parents can be, and sometimes are, held legally liable for not properly using child car seats, even without actual harm occurring, just for creating an unacceptable, preventable risk. Around where I live, local police and fire departments even hold periodic safety fairs to properly install child safety seats in peoples’ cars for them, and give them detailed hands-on instructions on how to properly use them. And local non-profits have periodic drives to purchase and give out child safety seats to people.
In what reality are they living that they honestly think that we as a society just accept as a matter of course that children will die in vehicle accidents?
COVID contrarians like Prasad and Krug seem to be confusing “long accepted” and “implemented long ago” with “doing nothing” and “accepting as a matter of course” when it comes to measures designed to decrease the number of child deaths due to vehicular trauma. It’s as if they’ve forgotten what the toll was before those measures were mandated and seem to shrug their shoulders at what is still an unacceptably high, albeit admittedly lower, death toll.
I like to add drowning deaths, too, given the many laws requiring adult supervision of children swimming and the fencing off of swimming pools to discourage children from jumping in. Also bicycling. Helmet laws, anyone?
Sure, back in the day (like 50 years ago) we didn’t have these laws, but we do now.
just like the tedious boomer facebook memes about surviving without bike helmets while lawn darts were falling out of the sky whining about ‘muh these new generations are sissies’ and ‘what happened to grit?’ all while engaging in some of the worst triggered grievance positions on every other topic that hits a nerve for them
Authentic boomer here. Indeed, my generation took all sorts of unnecessary risks, and for the most part we got away with it. Too bad for those who did not. Grit was often bought dearly and not always very useful. Thinking of my own near misses is one the main reasons I learned to take reasonable precautions and insisted that my children do so too. Seatbelts, bike helmets, sun screen, and all the other wimpy things the safety mafia pushes let us spend more time doing and less time recovering. Those tough old boomer memes annoy me too.
It is astonishing to me that people who lived through the end of the age of polio, and saw enough measles and chicken pox to know that they can be nasty, would reject vaccines. Do they not remember the schoolmates with leg braces and shriveled arms? Did they not hear about blindness and hearing loss after childhood diseases?
Age is supposed to bring wisdom, but I guess it does not always work out that way.
Yeah, I don’t think it’s just Boomers, either. I think it’s a function of age and how every generation as it ages seems to start thinking that it was tougher, harder working, and better behaved than the current generation of youth, disparaging young people as lazy, disrespectful, and weak. I see it already starting to happen in Millennials complaining about Gen Z, and the oldest Millennials are just approaching 40.
Those of us in Gen X have always felt like the middle child in all of this. It has been a truly bizarre journey. LOL
” I don’t think it’s just Boomers, either.” 100%, it seems ubiquitous over generations (even among some of my fellow GenXers). In retrospect I’m embarrassed that I deployed ‘boomer’, a nice flash of hypocrisy from me there! In some respects older generations routinely had at least a few things harder in life than the newbies generally speaking, so I can magnanimously understand why some old timers might feel a bit smug. That’s no excuse for looking down noses at the youth making their best of it (and typically putting in as much or more effort) in much more complex times.
Also, I think that the youth of today in many ways have it harder than my generation did. For instance, the Internet and social media are two-edged swords. Sure, you can Google almost anything and communicate almost instantaneously, which my generation could only dream of at that age, but there’s the very real challenge of cyberbullying, having your every dumb teenager mistake posted to social media, and the body image problems from, for example, Instagram in adolescent girls. I honestly don’t know if I actually did have it easier coming of age in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Not just Boomer memes. I’ve seen a lot of Gen X memes that are very similar. (I immediately hide them and sometimes block the account posting them.) It apparently seems to be a common trait among aging people to ascribe “weakness” and lack of moral rectitude to anyone seeking to make things safer and prevent children of suffering preventable deaths and severe injuries that claimed children when they were young. It’s also an offshoot of the human tendency to romanticize their youth, view their generation as superior to the current generation of young people, and complain that young people today aren’t as hardworking, morally upright, and tough as they were when they were that age. It’s an annoying tendency of older people that goes back to ancient Greece, at least.
It’s pure survivorship bias. Just because these people personally did these stupid dangerous things or lived through a time when laws didn’t prevent products from being far more dangerous than they needed to be and came out OK doesn’t mean that they weren’t dangerous things worth regulating or that as causes of death and injury they weren’t worth doing something about.
Late Generation X’er here (born in 1976).
The older generation bitching about the younger generation is nothing new. Every older generation has grumbled about the following generation. Heck, there is an example going back to 459 BCE!
I daresay that if we had a time machine and a translator, we could hear Ug complaining to Thag that kids these days have it so much easier with their bows and arrows, instead of having to hunt with spears.
There’s enough disparities and unevenness in the difficulty distribution within any population at any time (mostly along the lines of wealth) that these arbitrary generational stereotypes seem mostly dangerously useless outside of popular cultural trends. This makes me really hate it when they are rolled out, not unlike how I inadvertently opened this can of worms by throwing boomers under the bus for throwing everyone else under the bus. Not useful.
Eh, I’m a young Boomer, and I get annoyed by Boomers. I like to think of myself as old Gen X.😂
Really, I just saw a chance to point out that every generation complains about “those kids” as they age, usually starting as they start to approach 40, but sometimes even years before that.
True, but even for things that don’t rise to the level of needing regulation, isn’t part of growing up realizing “Man, those few things I did when I was young were really stupid: I got some stitches but it could have been way worse” and telling your kids “Hey, don’t do that”?
My nephew and I were continually given crap tons of firecrackers, cherry bombs, and M-80s when we were kids (mid 1960s). Lots of stupid stuff: wiring the big things together to make big explosions, sticking holes in apples, plugging in firecrackers and flinging them at each other, etc. There’s no way I would have considered letting my sons do that — I don’t know how my nephew and I didn’t get hurt at all: pure luck — yet I’ve had guys I teach with say “Yeah, those were the days. I wish my kids could do that.” WTF?
if its any consolation Cisero complained about much the same thing.
Could be ultimate ‘nothing new under the sun’ reference.
I had you figured for an older Gen Xer. Too comfortable with tech. You might have been kept young by having younger medical students and residents around, too. Works for me haha. They teach me all kinds of cultural references I promptly forget the next time I hear a Pearl Jam song.
“Man, those few things I did when I was young were really stupid: I got some stitches but it could have been way worse” and telling your kids “Hey, don’t do that”?
girlfriend and I, late ’80’, traveled to panama city. stooped by her relatives place. A worm farm with guinne hens for security.
Cousins were outside hiding behind hay bales shooting at each other with 22 rifles. One one because the other got tagged twice.
Told late-model daughter to have fun with it but make sure you win.
Adulting/parenting is probably not my skillset.
For me it is always fascinating how those who oppose vaccines will panic over a handful of children possibly, maybe, if you tilt you head right and squint while you look at the anecdotes, being harmed in any way by vaccines, but when you present to them hundreds of children being actually dead by vaccine preventable illnesses they simply shrug and say that it couldn’t be helped as though their stance on the matter is perfectly consistent in it’s logic.
It frightens me that these people see the deaths of others as a minor inconvenience and inconveniences happening to them as being worse than death, their notions of acceptable risks being that shockingly skewed.
First, I wonder how doctors advocating against vaccinating kids would react if their kid or nephew or grandchild died from COVID-19.
Second, there are two additional reasons to vaccinate kids:
1. Even if asymptomatic or mild the longer the virus is in a body the more mutations with potential risk of a more transmissible and/or more deadly variant
2. Kids can transmit virus. If near someone who couldn’t be vaccinated (e.g., on chemotherapy), vaccine didn’t take (e.g., organ transplant on immunosuppressants), or was vaccinated but immune system just didn’t react enough (e.g., very old people) , could infect them
Some will say that the above who are vulnerable should stay at home; however, no one points out that it could have been them or their loved ones. An old saying applies: “there but for the grace of G-d go I”. Too bad many people ignore this.
A doctor against vaccines is like a dentist against toothbrushes.
Thanks for writing about this paper. Am I reading Table 2 correctly if I say that CYP COVID CODs in 8/2021-7/2022 would have to be in error of ~100% (ie double counting) to adjust them down to 2019 “just the flu” status?
It’s interesting how anti-vaxxers I read decry the “damage” done to children by vaccines, masks and school closures but aren’t too upset about deaths from Covid.
Oh well, I guess those were the weaklings so no big deal.
What I see in clinic with anyone not already vaxxed is no thought given to doing so; even when they’ve had it tear through the house and the kids got a sniffle, middle aged got a bad flu, and grandma got a ride to the ER.
I remind them this will recur; they’re not magically safe from getting really sick the next time. Still doesn’t move some folks. I swear, some people WANT covid because it’s a guaranteed week or two off work. That’s another topic, though…
The last time I ever got the flu (some 15 years ago now), it was a year that for some reason I happened to skip the vaccination. I don’t recall why. I was busy changing jobs and somehow just never got around to it. In any event, it knocked me on my ass for a week less than a month after I started a new job. Now there’s a great way to get a week off and make an impression at your new place of work.
Oh I completely get it. We have a lot of patients who work in agriculture, slaughtering, factories, etc who would probably do anything for a paid day off (Understandably.)
Exciting news today: Steve Kirsch is forming a Super PAC to draft RFK Jr. to run for President.
No word yet on a running mate, but Stella Immanuel seems like the perfect choice.
The Kennedy Jr./Immanuel ticket is our only hope for victory over the demons plotting mass death by 2025, as most of the populace is destined to become bug-eating transgenders connected to a transhumanist super computer.*
*as Natural News eloquently warned this week.
I would pay to see a mime troup act that out.
San Francisco Mime Troupe. https://www.sfmt.org/
Bug-eating transgenders connected to a supercomputer?
I don’t eat bugs and I’m not connected to a supercomputer, though I spend a lot of time behind my computer, where does that leave me?
Are transgenders suddenly becoming the cause of everything wrong in the world?
It almost make me nostalgic for the good old days, when only radical feminists considered transgenders to be an evil invention of man, to bring women back under patriarchy.
Of cause one didn’t hear that uch about transgenders in those days.
Dr. Immanuel was not born in the USA so would not qualify. Given RFK Junior’s alleged interest in ecology perhaps Mr. Big Tree would be a more appropriate running mate. According to the Q-anon-sense supporters, that JFK Jr is planning to emerge from hiding and run with Donald J. Trump …
An RFK jr/ Bigtree ticket is the funniest thing I’ve heard all week.
The only serious thing is that a reasonably large group of people might actually vote for them.
Well alright then, balance the ticket by having RFK Jr. select Sherri Tenpenny for his running mate.
People, or at least objects, are magnetically attracted to her. 🧲 The filing date is approaching.
Wouldn’t that distract from p0wn1n6 teh mediaz?
Isn’t that the same judge tasked with ruling on mifepristone?
What a collection of grifters. I take it this is about the disinformation dozen.
Hey gang, hurry and get yours before they sell out!
https://www.zazzle.com/robert_kennedy_jr_for_president_2024_button-145938416496324455
I had a horrible thought: Trump vs Junior for president in 2024.
Even though I’m Canadian, I would still consider getting the hell far away.
Whitehorse, maybe Punta Arenas or Tasmania?
No official campaign bumper sticker yet, so you’ll have to make do with this:
https://www.zazzle.com/medical_freedom_anti_vax_ex_vax_rfk_jr_rectangular_sticker-217124035508634369
Damn, blast, and curse! If they had added “via 5G” I would have had BINGO.
[…] COVID-19 is now a leading killer of children – RESPECTFUL INSOLENCE […]
RFK jr’s CHD has called adding Covid vaccines to the children’s vaccination schedule “tragic” and “child abuse”.
Covid vaccines in general:
I just learned that my SO’s friend and my cousin** have recovered from Covid recently: they had the vaccines and boosters; he’s over 70 and she’s over 80 and both have had the TAVR procedure ( heart valve replacement). They’re fine, no major problems, no emergency or hospital care necessary.
** like Orac, my cousin studies the Holocaust and WWII: many years ago, working for the visiting nurse service, she took care of several women who were victims of the camps.
More anti-vax business:
Mikey ( NN today, 1:09:00) discusses a new dating site ( plus blood bank/ sperm bank) for the unvaccinated called ‘UNjected’ based in Maui but attracting the unvaxxed from around the world ( 110K members) HOWEVER the app was rejected as misinformation by the Store.
I’m sure they’ll spread the ‘joy’ virally though in other ways.
Reminds me of a Dutch political party, which is also very against anything to prevent the spread of Covid and has been spreading a load of bs on vaccines. They are also very much in complottheories. I think they have their own dating app, to find likeminded people, some app to find likeminded businessowners and their own schools. Some years ago the party was quite a success and got many votes, but it looks they are loosing it a bit, basicly because of several people leaving the party, because they were offended by the anti-semitism, and forming their own partys.
So it appears.
Speaking of docs who are showing signs of heading down the rabbit hole to join Prasad, McCullough et al: I’m hearing odd things from an Australian infectious diseases doc, Nick Coatesworth (he appears a lot in media interviews, hyped as “a top doctor” and even “Australia’s top doctor”). Coatesworth has opposed Covid vaccine mandates even for health care workers. This past week he said on Twitter that the “best thing” about being in private practice is that he doesn’t wear a mask and hasn’t for quite some time. He was also gleeful about equally outraging “Covid zealots” and antivaxers. He may be sliding closer to the latter group. Coatesworth recently appeared on a popular Aussie TV show on which the host supported the “Died Suddenly” meme. Coatesworth apparently pushed back against that, but also said he foresees an end to Covid boosters because their protection doesn’t last long enough. Other sample Coatesworth:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10614861/amp/Dr-Nick-Coatsworth-rubbishes-claims-need-FOURTH-Covid-vaccine-slams-Pfizer.html
I get the feeling Coatesworth is in danger of succumbing to the Substack Effect – the need to hold followers’ attention by making increasingly extreme and unsupportable statements.
[…] Security: Chief Actuary Says Bernie Sanders’s Plan Would Keep Program Alive Another 75 Years COVID-19 is now a leading killer of children More than half of Republicans support Christian nationalism, according to a new survey (related […]
[…] Prasad, whose methodolatry and willingness to spread dubious misinformation about COVID-19 and preach against vaccinating children I’ve written about a number of times before. On Monday Dr. Prasad wrote an article on his […]