As the push to vaccinate ever-younger children against COVID-19 continues, with the U.S. now even vaccinating infants as young as six months, new studies show why this is both unnecessary and risky, and why children and young people have very little to fear from Covid.
The large majority of children have now been infected with the virus. In the U.K., 82% of U.K. primary school children aged four to 11, almost none of whom are vaccinated, have detectable antibodies from a previous Covid infection, according to the ONS.
The ONS data do not directly tell us the proportion of children aged 12-18 who have antibodies from infection, as they do not distinguish between antibodies from infection and vaccination, and 65% of the age group are vaccinated. However, since 99.3% of secondary school children have detectable antibodies, there is no reason to suppose it will be less than 82%.
With almost all children now having been infected and so protected via natural immunity, there is little purpose to a vaccination or booster campaign.
But does protection from natural immunity last for children? According to a new study from Israel, it lasts very well. The pre-print study (not yet peer-reviewed) from the Delta period in Israel (July 1st to December 13th 2021) finds that children and adolescents previously infected “acquired durable protection against reinfection (symptomatic or not) with SARS-CoV-2 for at least 18 months”.
Protection of individuals aged five to 18 against symptomatic Covid was 93.6% in the first six months, declining gently to around 70% after 18 months (see below).
While the study doesn’t cover Omicron, which has greater immune evasion than earlier variants, a recent study from Qatar found that natural immunity in a young population persisted at over 50% for at least a year, whereas vaccine protection declined to zero or below (i.e., the vaccine made a person more likely to be infected) within six months.
With or without natural immunity, Covid is an extremely low risk to children. Notably, none of the 458,959 five to 18 year-olds in the Israeli study died with Covid, whether they had been previously infected or not.
A recent U.K. Government study by the UKHSA looked at all under-20s who had died with Covid up to the end of 2021. It found 185 deaths within 100 days of a positive PCR test, of which fewer than half – 81, 43.8% – were actually due to COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death. Of those, more than three quarters – 61, 75.3% – had an underlying condition, including 27 with severe neurodisability and 12 with compromised immunity. This left just 20 deaths in healthy under-20 year-olds in the first two years of the pandemic, comprising just 0.3% of all the 6,790 deaths in the age group.
The authors estimated the Covid infection fatality rate in under-20s to be 0.0007% – but this includes those with underlying conditions. For healthy under-20s it would be a quarter of that, or less than 0.0002%, which is two in a million.
By contrast, a recent study in France found that as many as 170 per million young people were hospitalised with severe heart inflammation following Covid vaccination. That rate is around two orders of magnitude (i.e., 100 times) higher than the IFR of COVID-19. It means that for every life the Covid vaccines save (assuming they prevent 100% of Covid deaths, which they don’t), up to 100 young people are hospitalised with severe myocarditis, the long-term prognosis of which is unknown. And that’s just one side-effect.
How can such a risk-benefit profile be worth it for children and young people?
What about Long Covid – do vaccines protect children and young people from having debilitating, ongoing Covid symptoms, as is sometimes claimed?
A number of studies have found that compared to a control group, and when Covid is identified by the presence of antibodies, there is little evidence that those who suffer from COVID-19 go on to suffer more long-term effects. But even if they do, there is also no evidence that vaccines prevent Long Covid, with one recent large U.S. study finding “no significant difference in the risk of… any long-Covid feature”.
There is also, of course, no evidence the vaccines prevent infection for very long at all.
Thus however you look at it, it’s hard to see how there can be any justification for vaccinating children and young people against COVID-19, which is unnecessary and risky, and brings no clear benefit whatsoever.
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A very helpful example of pseudo science.
It’s the kind of garbage collectivists lap up while searching for policies to solve social problems. We’re all, not just the homeless, like little lab rats on which they can act upon to “make the world a better place”.
This is similar to the Universal Basic Income which is another fraud. Hand every person £1K per month on top of the welfare system which sets a minimum level of income. Ridiculous. If you are homeless you cannot be handed cash. You need to repair many other issues first. The Welfare state is broke and broken. Enough already.
UBI would actually be better than the current welfare system. No means test, no discrimination, no perverse incentives.
There are big differences in why people might be homeless (or appear to be). Complex mental or physical health issues make some people unsuitable to ‘normal living’. Given social housing or sheltered accommodation and these people will still find their way back on the streets. Similarly there are the drug addicts and alcoholics that exhibit severe anti-social behavioral traits that money alone wont fix. Then there are the ‘professional’ beggars, there are also those exploited by criminal gangs in what is known as modern slavery.
Only anecdotally, but in a country like the UK with it’s generous welfare system and councils having a statuary responsibility to house anyone – I cant think of any reason why a person could be on the streets for lack of money. The first time in my life I saw real, genuine hardship was on a stag-do in Eastern Europe and ironically also in the supposedly wealthy USA.
FYI, you can watch Eva Vlaardingerbroek’s new (35min) documentary about the sorts of people living on the streets across Germany here. You will not be in a rush to visit after watching this. She speaks German too, clever lass. I can’t see how major cities in the UK would differ much from this tbh. Worth watching.
https://twitter.com/EvaVlaar/status/1703157698219458989
The study may not have been perfect, but Occam’s Razor would say that giving them unconditional cash DOES make them better off on balance, at least at the margin. I know conservatives don’t like the idea of “something for nothing” (unless they themselves benefit directly from it, and not “those people”) and think that everything must have more strings attached than a spider’s web (often conflating the normative with the descriptive), but come on now. Behind such opposition, I detect “the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism” that is causing such cognitive dissonance.
Well this conservative doesn’t like the idea of giving his money away. Occam’s razor would suggest to me that in the long run, giving people money without giving them other help does more harm than good.
1) No one in favor of it, including the authors, is saying they should be denied other help. That is a straw man, as we can walk and chew gum at the same time. 2) The money can simply be created, like all money is when you really look at it, so you don’t have to “give away” your own money if that bothers you. 3) And finally, as the late, great John Maynard Keynes famously said long ago, “in the long run, we are all dead”.
(Mic drop)
“2) The money can simply be created, like all money is when you really look at it, so you don’t have to “give away” your own money if that bothers you”
I don’t have the ability to create money, so giving mine away does bother me. Money can be created with a printing press, value can only be created through work.
This study has already been savaged in the Canadian and other media.
One was the pre-screening – everyone with addiction or mental issues were excluded. Only shorter-term homeless were excluded.
“age 19 to 65, homeless for less than 2 y (homelessness defined as the lack of stable housing), Canadian citizen or permanent resident, and nonsevere levels of substance use (DAST-10) (21), alcohol use (AUDIT) (22), and mental health symptoms Colorado Symptom Index (CSI) (23) based on predefined thresholds”.
There were many dropouts from the study etc.
“Of the 732 participants, 229 passed all criteria (31%). Due to loss of contact with 114 participants despite our repeated attempts to reach them, we successfully enrolled 115 participants in the study as the final sample (50 cash, 65 noncash0”
There were many problems with this study.