Dr David Gorski reminds me of a study that I’d seen a few weeks ago and had meant to write about because I thought it misleading. Gorski uses it to cudgel fellow medics, those who don’t agree with his hyper vax policy, those he calls “not anti vaxxers” but not pro enough for him. And the study gives him ammunition because it shows, he says, that Covid is a “leading cause of death amongst children”. I don’t agree, for reasons I’ll set out.
The above charts are from the study “Assessment of COVID-19 as the Underlying Cause of Death Among Children and Young People Aged 0 to 19 Years in the US”, link here.
My comments:
1. The top chart <1 y includes children that had “certain conditions arising in the perinatal period, P00-P96”, if they had Covid when they died -- from which we note how many diseases this one item includes and the number of which are very serious. These children died “with” a serious disease, rather than “from” Covid alone. Almost all of these had non-Covid illnesses serious enough for death, without Covid. Nevertheless, we know from evidence elsewhere that there were pressures to put Covid on death certificates, pressure easy to give in to because of federal government subsidies to deaths from Covid.
This inclusion of “with” various diseases, not “from” Covid alone is revealed deep in an appendix of the study, here.
If we remove the double counting, we had a figure of around 0.4 for Covid, below influenza.
2. Dr Gorski says that Covid is the most fatal of the respiratory illnesses for children and young people. However, he does not say — perhaps he hasn’t figured it out — that the top cause on the list above, the perinatal related diseases, include respiratory illnesses.
3. Gorski allows the lumping together of many diseases under “perinatal conditions” but breaks out the respiratory diseases, to create a separate list with Covid at the top! Manipulative, I’d say.
4. If you do break out the “perinatal diseases”, not only do they include respiratory illnesses, but it means that Covid ends up at the bottom of a much longer list of illnesses causing death amongst CYP.
5. Given the amount of comorbidities with the CYP in this study, when we strip them out, we end up with death rates of ~ one in a quarter of a million.
6. Just to note again that the study includes adults of 18-19, whereas Gorski and others quoting the study always talk of “children”, which is misleading.
Gorski says he tries to convince the hesitant doctors that we used to have childhood deaths from measles, until the vaccine. To which I’d note, as I believe, (1) that the measles vaccine did stop getting the disease, whereas Covid vaccines do not and (2) that measles vaccines last a lifetime (?) while Covid vaccines last 3-6 months.
Given death rates of healthy children catching Covid is less than 1 in 250,000, whereas likelihood of a side effect is one in 800, it ought to be up to the parents, given this knowledge, to decide for themselves.
