Are children the new Covid victims? Hardly.
Major news articles this week have sounded the alarm that small children are flooding the ICUs around the country. Louisiana is in dire straits, with 39 confirmed Covid pediatric hospitalizations across the entire state — wait a minute, really? Out of a statewide population of 4.67 million?
By Tatiana Prophet
Last Monday morning, ABC News, NPR and numerous other outlets hit us hard with their lead story: Children with Covid are being admitted to the ICU in droves. But if you look closely, the ABC7 article put out numbers of cases only, and not hospitalizations.
And where the anecdotal stories have pierced us in the ribs, they pivot to numbers that don’t apply to the original anecdote.
Take this New York Times article, “The Delta Variant Is Sending More Children to the Hospital. Are They Sicker, Too?” The “lede” is a soft one, the kind that begins with someone’s name, signaling this will be an intimate look. They focus on Sophia Gomez, a healthy 12-year-old Floridian who got Covid-19 and developed pneumonia, whereupon she was hospitalized (she is home now). Pneumonia is a common progression of the disease. It means an infection (of any kind) of the air sacs in the lungs (i.e. the lower respiratory tract). In terms of Covid, it can occur in the vulnerable, or in healthy people if it is not treated early. In fact, when we first heard about the novel coronavirus, global health authorities referred to it as atypical pneumonia.
What’s more, most people don’t know that when the CDC counts deaths, they have a separate column for covid or pneumonia and covid or flu, and then influenza only (but not pnuemonia only). This is because, even with all the frenetic PCR testing, not every death has been lab-tested. In other words, a doctor signed the death certificate suspecting Covid. See my exposé here.
It turns out that the Times article does not answer its own question whether the Delta variant is making children sicker; and like most articles on Covid, the experts quoted always say the same thing: Covid is spreading, people are dying, and it’s the fault of the unvaccinated. But the biggest message of all is that the only solution to severe pediatric Covid cases is that children 5 to 11 should be getting vaccinated. Some experts even stated that younger than 5 should be vaccinated as soon as possible.
Many of those experts also have conflicts of interest.
Take Mark W. Kline, M.D., who spoke to Robyn Roberts on Good Morning America. Kline by his own admission on LinkedIn has received more than $150 million in research and training grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and U.S. Agency for International Development. And, like his benefactor Dr. Tony Fauci, Kline gives good quote. “This is not your grandfather’s Covid-19,” he told Roberts. Hardy har har. Really? We’re that prepped, are we? He sounds like Fauci Jr.
But the fact that Kline got a huge sum of research money from the NIH is probably just the tip of the iceberg in conflicts of interest.
An examination of Health and Human Services Data shows 39 pediatric confirmed Covid patients in the state of Louisiana, with 13 confirmed Covid aedmitted the previous day, and 2 suspected Covid admitted the previous day.
The first thing we have to realize is that the declarations of Covid forcing a spike in pediatric ICU admissions is impossible to prove with current data. A localized spike (without raw numbers) may not be caused by Covid at all, or it might be due to multiple reasons .It turns out that some states are seeing an increase in the population of pediatric ICUs around the country related to Covid. Most of the articles centered around the state of Lousiana.
There are many reasons why many of our most trusted federal health officials, health insurers, drug makers, media and academia have all conspired to massage our perception of what is really going on right now. Those who refuse to fall in line are summarily canceled — even when they are clearly whistleblowers (supposedly a protected status?). When written about, their claims are twisted into strawman arguments that they did not utter.
Those who remain in power are either lacking in training or competence, or compromised in some way.
Watch this video and decide of Catherine O’Neal, chief medical officer of the hospital. She is impassioned and she gives good quote; but you rate her performance.
In terms of preexisting conditions, asthma, obesity and diabetes are the primary comorbidities for pediatric Covid deaths. There are also a large number of “unknown” underlying conditions; but according to the fine print, that is not because there weren’t underlying conditions, but because data may not have been available. See figure:
So we’re here to see data. Pediatric data from the CDC is somehow separate from what is publicly available from many state health departments — which present Covid ICU data, but don’t break it down by age. However, looking at the overall Covid ICU percentage IS instructive — because while mainstream media is sounding the 5-alarm fire, the data itself is more instructive. That is is still very low — that matters. We should be cautious; but we don’t want to cause panic either.
View gallery for screen shots of the ICU data from the Centers for Disease Control as well as the department of Health and Human Services, a cavernous natural umbrella overseeing the CDC and NIH as well as the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
There is no doubt that healthcare workers in Louisiana are overworked and that hospitals are scrambling under this modest increase. The question is why? Hospital associations in each state keep their numbers behind an access wall, unlike government which is required by law to publish their data. But in California, we found that the “bed shortage” was actually a manufactured staffing shortage. Read that article here. There are far fewer ICU beds in some states than the national average. Some of this is due to a focus on profits and not public health.
Finally, the question of the unvaccinated as driving pediatric transmission of Covid, whether original or Delta variant. Like the Associated Press article a couple weeks ago, saying more than 90 percent of all Covid deaths are in the unvaccinated was a figure arrived at by subtracting “breakthrough deaths” from total deaths. These numbers are not a result of someone at the hospital reporting these numbers. Look at the screenshot below of what percentage of the state’s covid losses are unvaccinated: when you go from the state to the parish level, the percentage remains exactly the same. So an absence of data is being passed off as data, it appears.
STATE LEVEL (See upper right drop-down menu).
East Baton Rouge parish, which includes the capital city of Baton Rouge. Same percentage “unvaccinated.”
