The Coronavirus continues to ravage the country and the world, sparing nobody. Sadly, the terrible virus has not spared children, either. This is why it’s so important that children remain locked inside just like the adults until we have at least 5 straight years with zero deaths of any kind anywhere on Earth. If they must leave the home, children should wear two masks, social distance, and be placed into anti-COVID pods when they must participate in band practice. Just like adults, children are dropping like flies from COVID.
Or are they?
According to the best available data we could find, around 100 children died from COVID in the US in 2020. This takes into account the tremendously inflated statistics of all COVID deaths in the US.
The government of Sweden never closed schools, yet no children died of COVID, and teachers were not negatively affected by the schools being open, either.
The CDC does not seem to publish data on overall deaths of children, though it does have a chart which includes the age groups of under 1, 1-4, 5-9, 10-14, and 15-24. The CDC chart seems to coincide with the NEJM chart included below. The American Academy of Pediatrics (a pro-lockdown, authoritarian association) said that the total number of COVID deaths among children throughout the whole pandemic is 133, as reported by NBC in November. The highest estimate I found comes from a chart from the AAP, which estimates that a total of 241 children have died with COVID from the beginning of the pandemic through February 11th of 2021.
Here are some of my takeaways from all of the data I’ve seen (and my 9 years of experience in emergency medicine, which includes working in a COVID-specific hospital):
The flu killed 188 children in each of the past two years (the 2018 and 2019 flu seasons), according to the CDC. This is substantially more than COVID, which killed around 100 children in 2020, taking into account massive overcounting. As an experienced advanced-level healthcare provider, it boggles my mind that children are being harmed with masks, quarantine, and other forms of psychological torture due to the threat of COVID, but no such precautions were even considered due to the flu. Massive amounts of data have demonstrated that while children are susceptible to contracting, spreading, and suffering severe illness from the flu, they rarely contract COVID, nearly never spread it, and essentially never become severely ill from it. Furthermore, considering that the coronavirus replaced the flu in 2020, children are literally safer than ever before. For the first time in recent history, they could be children without even worrying about the flu. We should be celebrating that and letting them live life. We should not be traumatizing them and scarring them for life.
However, politicians and their loyal and paranoid followers are destroying their children’s mental (and physical) health by locking them inside, keeping them from friends and normal activities, and brainwashing them with intense paranoia, convincing them that they will die a horrible death if they even lower their mask for an instant. What is the result of this? We are beginning to see that children and adults are becoming depressed, turning to drugs, and killing themselves at alarming rates, not to mention the child abuse and domestic violence fueled by corona-fascism.
“We’re seeing, sadly, far greater suicides now than we are deaths from Covid. We’re seeing far greater deaths from drug overdose, that are above excess, than we had as background, than we are seeing deaths from Covid.” – CDC director Robert Redfield
According to the New England Journal of Medicine and the CDC, fires kill around three times as many children as COVID, choking kills around fourteen times as many children as COVID, drowning kills around nine times as many children as COVID, heart disease kills around six times as many children as COVID, cancer kills around eighteen times as many children as COVID, suicide kills eleven times more children than COVID, homicide kills eighteen times as many children as COVID, and poisoning kills around eight times as many children as COVID. Needless to say, COVID would not make the top-ten list of causes of deaths for children in the US. If society must totally restructure everything in existence to save 100 children in the US per year, it certainly must criminalize fires and hot water, ban all dangerous substances, abolish all firearms, and prohibit the use of pools and require all children to wear flotation devices at all times, otherwise they might drown.
Especially when discussing pediatric immunology, we must at least touch on the basic concept known as the ‘hygiene hypothesis’. Over the past few decades, western medicine, and specifically doctors specializing in immunology and infectious disease have reached a consensus, meaning that it’s not just a hypothesis anymore. The data shows that children who are not exposed to pathogens (viruses and bacteria) and/or children who are drowned in hand sanitizer and antibacterial soap do not properly develop immune systems. This is hardly shocking, because we all learned in middle school that humans generally achieve immunity to a given pathogen by being exposed to it (or a vaccine or a similar pathogen). While it may not be wise to purposely expose your baby to every single pathogen in the universe in one day, going too far in the other direction – sanitizing your child’s developing immune system is certainly harmful.
In September of 2019, US News advised readers to ensure that their immune systems develop properly, recommending to “Reduce your use of chlorine-based cleaners, skip the antibacterial soaps, start a garden, consider getting a pet, and to have closer interactions with people.”
In 2017, the Independent published an article about immunology, quoting Professor Gilbert, the director of the Microbiome Center at the University of Chicago: “…parents can often over-sterilise environments for their children. When children are in the garden playing in mud for example, it’s not necessary to immediately sterilise their hands and worry that the mud may have got close to their faces…The fear that children should be kept out of contact with animals because of germs is also unfounded, according to Prof Gilbert. Instances such as a dog licking a child’s face are in fact beneficial for their immune system rather than a cause for concern.”
There is certainly a healthy balance between living life in a paranoid super-sanitized manner with no exposure to any molecule in existence and sending your children to African jungles without any shots. It is disappointing to me that the rest of the medical (or political?) community seems silent about this balance now that we are living in a ‘new normal’, where pathogens, medicine, data, and logic no longer factor into public policy.
Considering that children are unlikely to contract the coronavirus, unlikely to spread it (especially if asymptomatic), and unlikely to be severely affected by it, politicians and parents ought to reconsider whether the cost of the ‘new normal’ is worth the damage. Society is severely harming children in so many ways, and the maximum possible benefit of totally eliminating COVID would spare around 100 children from death, according to the best available data. If we are to flip the world upside down for anything that kills over 100 children per year, we must make some radical changes to stop the hundreds of deaths from drowning, fires, cancer, heart disease, and the many other ailments that kill far more children than the coronavirus.
