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COVID Bright Spots: Kids, Comorbidities and Getting on with Life

Lately I've seen concerning videos about the hazards of COVID vaccines: that the spike proteins the vaccines create once injected don't stay at the injection site; that the spike proteins are prevalent in ovaries and bone marrow at 48 hours (though it's not clear how long they remain); and the spike proteins themselves are damaging. I haven't been able to track down the accuracy of these claims--generic fact checkers all state "no evidence," and more technical refutations from scientists are beyond my pay grade. The original report on spike proteins in ovaries and bone marrow is in Japanese. But none of the fact checks I've read explain why the VAERS system is blowing up with reports of death and permanent disability following COVID vaccinations--why there are more deaths reported after COVID shots than after all other vaccines combined over the past 30 years or more. The VAERS list includes 17 deaths from smallpox vaccine, which hasn't been given for 50 years--so the data must go back even further than 1990. 

Deaths reported following vaccines (top 38 vaccines). Some repeated names are different kinds of vaccines for the same illness.  Data Source: United States Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Public Health Service (PHS), Centers for Disease Control (CDC) / Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) 1990 - 06/04/2021, CDC WONDER On-line Database. Accessed at http://wonder.cdc.gov/vaers.html on Jun 13, 2021 8:49:09 PM

Could it be false reports? That's a possibility, but 1) it's a crime to make false reports to VAERS, 2) the VAERS system isn't well-known to the general public, and 3) almost every time I go to YouTube I see a news story about someone who had a heart attack or died or both right after their shot. One of my coworkers died of a heart attack a few days after her shot, and even some young people are rarely getting myocarditis (inflammation of the heart). The latter reaction is rare and as far as I know, no young person has died of it, but all of this suggests something is wrong with these vaccines. This is exactly the reason many of us took a wait-and-see approach. 

Of course, all risks are in comparison to available alternatives--or to comparable situations for some perspective. Remember the H1N1 outbreak of 2009-2010? (No? Neither did I.) That season saw 288 pediatric deaths from the flu in the US. COVID has claimed 380 kids in the US as of June 16, 2021, which averages out to 304 for one year. For every million kids under 18, 4.1 kids per year have died of COVID. But as many as 7.7 per million died in some states during the H1N1 outbreak. 

I've looked at various videos, studies and news reports on kids and COVID, and so far, I haven't seen any cases of kids dying of COVID without comorbidities, though it's possible that has occurred. So if you have a healthy child of normal weight, it looks like they're at less risk of dying of COVID than they would have been from the flu in 2009/2010--or most other years.

In fact, most of us without comorbidities are at far lower risk of dying than the media suggests. The CDC says, "For over 5% of [COVID] deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned on the death certificate. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death." The "fact checkers" were quick to jump on sites that said that 95% of the people didn't really die of COVID. That claim is a little inaccurate, but so is the media giving the impression that we're living through a black plague. 

Lately, though, I've also seen headlines that over 99% of hospitalized COVID patients are unvaccinated. The stories carry the whiff of schadenfreude and superiority, but as I see it, it means the finger waggers can shuck their masks, drop the pretense that they're being put upon by anti-vaxxers, and find some business of their own to mind. Whatever the risks, the vaccines look like they do a good job of preventing COVID.

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