The Playground

    Quote from Wyttenbach

    WHO = world harassment Organization.

    The Gates foundation paid (bribed members) WHO to change the basic definition of a pandemic.


    A pandemic can be declared for any "new" virus/bacteria etc. spreading in multiple continents. This virus can be totally harmless like the Swine flu virus but this is a green card for top down fear mongering and cash generation (vaccines, disinfectants etc.) for big pharma. Member are obliged to fight any pandemic.


    The next pandemic will be centered around a flattelation/ pass gas bacteria...

    Quote from Wyttenbach

    The Gates foundation paid (bribed members) WHO

    No bribe.... just weaponised philanthropy.... 780,000,000..$

    External Content www.youtube.com
    Content embedded from external sources will not be displayed without your consent.
    Through the activation of external content, you agree that personal data may be transferred to third party platforms. We have provided more information on this in our privacy policy.

    TM9..28

    Switzerland:: Omicron wave breaks down by close to 50% from top already. Same for hospital/ICU -15% Omicron fraction 3.February 99.2%. What means 99.7..99.8 currently.


    Thus reported CoV-19 deaths from most countries (France is 99.8% Omicron!) are now 99.8% with CoV-19 and no longer from. Just ignore it as the standard fear mongering data used to block your mind.

    US vaccine ‘adverse events’ 2021 data is 15x 2020


    US vaccine ‘adverse events’ 2021 data is 15x 2020
    The Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) 2021 dataset is more than 15 times larger than that of 2020, accounting for 35% of all data in the
    trialsitenews.com


    The Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) 2021 dataset is more than 15 times larger than that of 2020, accounting for 35% of all data in the VAERS system. Despite continued assurances of vaccine safety from regulatory and public health agencies, the dataset in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) VAERS database represents a material difference from any previous year in reported serious adverse events. CDC acknowledges serious adverse events (SAE) associated with the COVID-19 vaccines authorized and approved in the United States yet reminds all they are a rare occurrence. The CDC goes on the record that the serious adverse event reports in VAERS are not necessarily associated with COVID-19. Moreover, for a truly accurate comparison to previous years the total number of vaccines administered doses must be compared to previous year. For example, starting in 2021 the COVID-19 vaccination program represented the largest such mass vaccination in U.S. history with an unprecedented 547 million doses administered to date. Undoubtedly SAEs would increase with such a vast endeavor. But what’s an acceptable amount of SAEs — given risk-benefit analyses associated with the dangers of SARS-CoV-2—from over 900,000 deaths to anywhere from 10% to 30% experience long COVID?


    TrialSite has followed the alarming cases of adverse events including deaths after the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines. The CDC confirmed increasing reports of deaths in VAERS from COVID-19 vaccine recipients, though causality was not indicated. Of course, TrialSite reminds the reader of a catastrophic COVID-19 death count with over 5.8 deaths worldwide and over 943,000 in America alone. With growing problems with long COVID (representing anywhere from 10% to 30% of COVID-19 cases) the government’s risk-benefit calculus weighs far heavier on the benefit side of the equation—across the board even when applied to children.


    Now both mRNA-based vaccines (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna) are formally approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), yet the companies enjoy liability shields due to the PREP Act emergency declaration. Although POTUS mandates were mostly rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, the one associated with Health and Human Services Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services stands, as do many vaccination rules at the local level such as school district in Los Angeles.


    The Data: High Level Observations

    The VAERS system contains data submitted from 1990 to the present. With the release of COVID-19 vaccines in 2020, the VAERS database expanded at an unprecedented rate. Again, this correlates with the unprecedented number of COVID-19 vaccinations totaling 547 million doses and climbing.



    By the end of 2021, the new COVID-19 vaccines rose to the top with the highest number of adverse reports. The number of reported adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccines exceeded the combined number of reactions to the next 12 vaccines.


    TrialSite reviews VAERS data for the years 2020 and 2021 below.


    Events reported in the VAERS 2020 and 2021 database

    VAERS 2020 VAERS 2021

    20 vaccine manufacturers in VAERS database 42 vaccine manufacturers in VAERS database

    60,224 adverse events reported 1,884,520 adverse events reported

    COVID-19 vaccines were 2nd in position of reported adverse events and 6th position in reported deaths. COVID-19 vaccines were 1st in position of all reported adverse events and deaths. They had more reported events than the next seven vaccines combined.

    There were 1,884,520 reported events in total across the 95 vaccine products in the 2021 database. Of these, the seven highest-ranking vaccine products accounted for 1,225,371 (65%) events reported. Data for these seven vaccines is displayed below.


    Table 1: Vaccine products with highest number of adverse events reported in 2021


    Vaccine Products 2021 No. of events reported (Total: 1,884,520) Percentage

    COVID19 VACCINE (COVID-19) 754,971 51.23%

    ZOSTER VACCINE (VARZOS) 98,692 6.70%

    INFLUENZA VIRUS VACCINE, TRIVALENT (INJECTED) (FLU3(SEASONAL)) 93,352 6.33%

    VARIVAX-VARICELLA VIRUS LIVE (VARCEL) 80,165 5.44%

    MEASLES, MUMPS AND RUBELLA VIRUS VACCINE, LIVE (MMR) 77,482 5.26%

    PNEUMOCOCCAL VACCINE, POLYVALENT (PPV) 60,978 4.14%

    HEPATITIS B VACCINE (HEP) 59,731 4.05%


    Graph 1: Vaccine Products versus number of events reported 2021 database

    The table and graph below show the 2020 VAERS reports of vaccine products and events.




    Table 2: Vaccine products and number of events reported in 2020 VAERS database


    Vaccine Product No. of events reported (Total 60,224) Percentage

    ZOSTER VACCINE (VARZOS) 12,773 25.44%

    COVID19 VACCINE (COVID19)* 10,908 21.73%

    INFLUENZA VIRUS VACCINE, QUADRIVALENT (INJECTED) (FLU4(SEASONAL)) 6,560 13.07%

    PNEUMOCOCCAL VACCINE, POLYVALENT (PPV) 2,955 5.89%

    INFLUENZA VIRUS VACCINE, NO BRAND NAME (FLUX(SEASONAL)) 2,344 4.67%

    UNKNOWN VACCINES (UNK) 1,818 3.62%

    VARIVAX-VARICELLA VIRUS LIVE (VARCEL) 1,698 3.38%

    The first COVID-19 vaccine authorized for emergency use in the United States, UK and Europe by the end of 2020.



    Graph 2: Vaccine products versus number of events in the 2020 VAERS

    Manufacturers and Number of Events

    The number of vaccine manufacturers reported in the database more than doubled in one year between 2020 and 2021, from 20 to 42. The three manufacturers with the highest numbers of adverse events in 2021 were Merck, Moderna, and Pfizer-BioNTech.


    Table 3: Vaccine manufacturers in 2021 with reported events


    Vaccine Manufacturer No. of events reported Percentage

    MERCK & CO. INC. 397,281 26.96%

    MODERNA 345,588 23.45%

    PFIZER-BIONTECH 343,239 23.29%

    SANOFI PASTEUR 203,501 13.81%

    GLAXOSMITHKLINE BIOLOGICALS 157,487 10.69%

    PFIZER-WYETH 116,846 7.93%

    UNKNOWN MANUFACTURER 88,988 6.04%

    JANSSEN 64,506 4.38%

    NOVARTIS VACCINES AND DIAGNOSTICS 33,558 2.28%

    CONNAUGHT LABORATORIES 32,854 2.23%


    Graph 3: Vaccine manufacturers and reported events 2021

    The manufacturers with the highest number of events reported in 2020 were GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, and Pfizer-BioNTech. Moderna ranked sixth.


    Table 4: Vaccine manufacturers with reported events 2020


    Vaccine Manufacturers No. of events reported 2020 Percentage

    GLAXOSMITHKLINE BIOLOGICALS 16,277 32.42%

    MERCK & CO. INC. 12,284 24.47%

    PFIZER\BIONTECH 7,743 15.42%

    SANOFI PASTEUR 7,653 15.24%

    UNKNOWN MANUFACTURER 4,935 9.83%

    MODERNA 3,142 6.26%

    SEQIRUS, INC. 2,823 5.62%

    PFIZER\WYETH 2,043 4.07%

    NOVARTIS VACCINES AND DIAGNOSTICS 1,270 2.53%

    PROTEIN SCIENCES CORPORATION 854 1.70%


    Graph 4: Vaccine manufacturers and reported events 2020

    The database reveals that COVID-19 vaccines are associated with a vast expansion in VAERS data from 2020 to 2021—at least that’s how individuals are entering reports. However, as TrialSite has cautioned, health authorities, starting with the CDC, continue to declare that the SAE numbers aren’t necessarily linked to the COVID-19 vaccines. There is no causation and it’s often difficult to prove, especially when applying to individuals with comorbidities. In most of the deaths TrialSite has tracked federal investigators deny any proof of causation or even association.


    CDC positions to the public that in relation to the over 547 million doses administered, any actual SAE remains an extremely rare event. Given the risk-benefit analysis inputs (e.g., risks associated with SARS-CoV-2 infections including growing incidence of long COVID) the government agency declares not only that the “COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective” but also that CDC recommends “everyone ages 5 years older get vaccinated as soon as possible to protect against COVID-19 and its potentially severe complications.”


    The CDC continues to assure that the vaccines are under rigorous ongoing scrutiny—“the most intense safety monitoring program in U.S. history. Thus, the national public health agency assures the entire American population that the risks of COVID-19 far outweigh any risks associated with the rare probability of a SAE associated with the COVID-19 vaccines. events. Some physicians critical of the public narrative worry about the longer term effects of multiple vaccine boosts. Study data for two doses, let alone three doses are still under way

    Quote from Mark U

    An embalmer of two decades reports that starting around the Covid injections, he has increasingly had to extract anomalous, rubbery, white fibrous long clots from his subjects in order to properly pump in the embalming solution. It looks like some people are producing what may be fibrin along length of their veins and even arteries. Over half of the bodies he has treated lately have the condition to one degree or another. Not good.

    Steve Kirsch later interviewed the embalmer described above, and now he has interviewed another embalmer, a lady named Anna Foster from Ohio who has been doing the work for a decade. She's never seen before what she is seeing since about mid 2021 : long white fibrous clots that are interfering with both blood drainage and injection of embalming fluid. Two other embalmers she knows are also seeing the same thing. How much longer before this becomes mainstream news? Embalmers themselves are not prone to talk about it publicly so it may take awhile.


    Explosive: Embalmer reveals 93% of cases have deadly clots caused by the COVID vax
    Anna Foster is an embalmer with 11 years of experience in Carrollton, MO. She speaks out for the first time in this exclusive interview. The big news is that…
    rumble.com

    Vaccine spike protein remains in body for at least 8 weeks.


    Immune imprinting, breadth of variant recognition, and germinal center response in human SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination


    DEFINE_ME


    During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, novel and traditional vaccine strategies have been deployed globally. We investigated whether antibodies stimulated by mRNA vaccination (BNT162b2), including third-dose boosting, differ from those generated by infection or adenoviral (ChAdOx1-S and Gam-COVID-Vac) or inactivated viral (BBIBP-CorV) vaccines. We analyzed human lymph nodes after infection or mRNA vaccination for correlates of serological differences. Antibody breadth against viral variants is lower after infection compared with all vaccines evaluated but improves over several months. Viral variant infection elicits variant-specific antibodies, but prior mRNA vaccination imprints serological responses toward Wuhan-Hu-1 rather than variant antigens. In contrast to disrupted germinal centers (GCs) in lymph nodes during infection, mRNA vaccination stimulates robust GCs containing vaccine mRNA and spike antigen up to 8 weeks postvaccination in some cases. SARS-CoV-2 antibody specificity, breadth, and maturation are affected by imprinting from exposure history and distinct histological and antigenic contexts in infection compared with vaccination.


    A Health Public Policy Nightmare

    Vaccine spike antigen and mRNA persist for two months in lymph node germinal centers..


    A Health Public Policy Nightmare
    Vaccine spike antigen and mRNA persist for two months in lymph node germinal centers...
    rwmalonemd.substack.com

    .

    Very pleased to see that Steve Kirsch is informed about the enormous controversy surrounding the small pox immunization program over 100 years ago. Like the Covid injection, it was not tested properly, it killed people by the thousands, was nonetheless mandated, and worldwide protests ensued. Perhaps because the history of the smallpox vaccine has been whitewashed and even glorified, we find ourselves repeating history. Pic from about 1920.


    Today's pandemic response is eerily similar to the smallpox pandemic response
    Do you remember how we got out of the mandates for smallpox? Most of my readers won't remember it, probably because it happened over 135 years ago. Here's the…
    stevekirsch.substack.com


    Is Our Pandemic the Ghost of the 1889 Russian Flu?


    Is Our Pandemic the Ghost of the 1889 Russian Flu? | The Tyee
    The ‘dreaded disease’ that claimed 1.5 million looks a lot like COVID-19, including the long-term threat posed by ‘viral promiscuity.’
    thetyee.ca



    In 1889, a mysterious disease arose in the Asian city of Bukhara, an ancient trade centre in what is now called Uzbekistan. It soon spread to the port city of St. Petersburg in Russia. By December it had conquered most of Europe, catching free rides on newly completed continental railroads or shiny steamships that crossed the Atlantic in six days.

    Everyone called the malady the Russian flu or that “dreaded Russian disease” because it travelled from the East with a rapidity that would not have surprised Omicron observers.


    At the time, physicians initially discounted the outbreak as nothing more than a “jolly rant” or another cold. Most predicted a mild and short visitation. They were wrong on both points.


    The “dreaded Russian disease” persisted in waves over a five-year period, eventually killing more than 1.5 million people on a planet then inhabited by only 1.5 billion humans. It reappeared in 1900.

    About one in a 100 people infected by the contagion either died from pneumonia or experienced severe illness affecting the brain, lungs or stomach. The breadth and persistence of the outbreak reintroduced the word “pandemic” to the English vocabulary.



    To this day, the little-known biological storm ranks as one of the globe’s great disease outbreaks in terms of scale and mortality.


    Now, 133 years after that event, virologists and historians suspect that a novel coronavirus triggered the so-called “Russian flu pandemic.” Many view this pandemic as a dramatic historical preview of the current one — complete with variants, waves and longhaulers suffering from chronic neurological complications.


    Here are five scenes from this fascinating and evolving story:


    SCENE ONE: BELGIUM, 2005

    After Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, scared the world with an aborted outbreak that killed 800, the coronavirus family suddenly fell into scientific fashion.


    In particular, many researchers wondered about four members of this virus family — types 229E, NL63, OC43 and HKU1 — that cause common human colds. Were they as benign as they appeared and did they begin their evolutionary careers that way?


    A group of Belgian scientists at the Leuven University began that inquiry by sequencing the genome for OC43. To their surprise, it bore many genetic similarities to a disease-causing coronavirus in cattle. (Most coronaviruses live in animals — everything from whales to bats).


    First identified in 1967, OC43 accounts for about 10 to 30 per cent of all the sniffles and other minor ailments people associate with having “a cold.” As a consequence, medical authorities gave it short shrift.


    In contrast, when veterinarians discovered a bovine coronavirus in Nebraska in 1971, they took a different attitude. The bovine coronavirus not only caused severe diarrhea in calves, but it was later found to cause winter dysentery in adult cows and shipping fever in feedlot cattle. Researchers eventually called the triumvirate illness — needing several factors to elicit sickness — Bovine Respiratory Disease Complex, or BRDC. Researchers suspected that the emergence and spread of BRDC had a lot to do with “existing herd management practices including crowded housing, transportation, constant influx of new animals, production-associated stresses in cows.”


    Puzzled by similarities between BRDC and OC43, the Belgium researchers performed what is called “a molecular clock analysis” and traced the evolution of the two viruses back in time to approximately 1890. That’s where they found a common ancestor in cattle for both viruses.


    Around 1890, the bovine coronavirus diverged and popped into human populations as OC43, where it began another evolutionary journey that ended unpredictably as a common cold.


    The researchers cited some striking arguments to support their hypothesis. In the second half of the 19th century, a number of highly infectious epidemics or murrains plagued cattle around the world as urbanization, globalization and industrialization unsettled agricultural landscapes. They included a mycoplasma, rinderpest and possibly coronaviruses — long a fixture of wild ruminants.

    The outbreaks prompted massive killings of infected cattle. The relentless culling created opportunities for the spread of animal viruses from their handlers to urban populations and other ruminants as well.


    In addition, the researchers noted that a troubling influenza pandemic had swept over the world in 1890. The symptoms of the pandemic included high fever, pneumonia and strange central nervous system disorders that often lasted for years. What’s more, influenza viral experts had not been able to trace the pandemic to a particular influenza subtype with any real precision.


    The study concluded that the SARS outbreak in 2003 wasn’t an anomaly, but part of a phenomenon that proved the “viral promiscuity” of coronaviruses. The study appeared in the Journal of Virology with little fanfare and was largely forgotten until the 2019 pandemic.


    SCENE TWO: LONDON, 1891

    Dr. Henry Franklin Parsons, a distinguished physician in England, had a problem. Alarmed by a troubling influenza epidemic that had given “rise to much inconvenience” and “much pain,” the British government has asked him to file an extensive report.


    But Parsons faced a medical puzzle. Although the epidemic definitely appeared to be some form of influenza, it didn’t exactly behave that way.


    “The catarrhal symptoms have been less recent than in many former epidemics,” noted Parsons in his 1891 Report on the Influenza Epidemic of 1889-90.


    The general absence of congested nasal passages and sniffling in so many of the sick led some observers “to doubt whether the recent epidemic has been one of true influenza,” wrote Parsons.


    One chronicler bluntly described some of the afflicted as “persons in a peculiar dazed stupid condition for about two weeks, unable to think or do their work.”


    In addition, the strange malady primarily struck down older adults and left children relatively unscathed, which wasn’t how classic influenza normally worked.


    Persons with weak lungs and those suffering from heart disease or kidney troubles also appeared to most seriously affected. Death by pneumonia was not uncommon.


    Other doctors told Parsons that they likened the outbreak not to influenza, but to malaria and dengue fever. They noted that the dreaded Russian disease caused “distressing pain” in the forehead, temple, eyes and face. Some even prescribed quinine, an anti-malarial drug, for treatment.


    Moreover, these neurological pains reoccurred in devastating bouts. The infected also lost their sense of smell and taste.

    In the end, Parsons carefully catalogued all of these puzzles, but stuck to his influenza diagnosis. He explained away the anomalies by noting many physicians really hadn’t seen an influenza epidemic before (the last one to hit England occurred in 1847) and that maybe the weather accounted for some of the different symptoms.


    But Parsons wasn’t the only doctor to note a raft of inconsistencies. In Ontario, Canada, the Hamilton Herald reported that the Russian flu “differs entirely from any previous kind of influenza,” adding that “it visits the seat of disease which is incident to the person attacked such as the kidneys, liver, lungs and heart.”


    SCENE THREE: UNIVERSITY OF LONDON, 2020

    As medical historian and journalist Mark Honigsbaum started hearing more stories about the baffling conditions experienced by COVID-19 longhaulers, he realized that historically, they weren’t alone. Nor were they the first.


    Like COVID, the Russian flu left behind a large population of invalids suffering from a bewildering array of neurological symptoms, including loss of memory, loss of energy, anxiety and “post-grippal numbness.” The conditions, which often lasted years, intrigued and baffled doctors throughout the 1890s.


    As Honigsbaum noted in an article in The Lancet: “The official end of the pandemic, therefore, did not mean the end of illness but was merely the prelude to a longue durée of baffling sequelae.”


    One specialist doctor even observed the dreaded Russian disease “runs up and down the nervous keyboard stirring up disorder and pain in different parts of the body with what almost seems malicious caprice.”


    The English suffragette Josephine Butler, for example, compared her chronic ailment to a bout of malaria.


    “I am so weak that if I read or write for half an hour I become so tired and faint that I have to lie down,” Butler wrote to a friend.


    Other public figures felled by insomnia and fatigue included the British prime minister and even the First Lord of the Admiralty.


    Long-term complications from the Russian influenza were so prevalent, that by the middle of the 1890s, doctors blamed everything from rising suicide rates, to general feelings of unease and depression to the long shadow of the disease. In fact the pandemic’s invalids became “central to the period’s medical and cultural iconography,” noted Honigsbaum.


    But unlike the current pandemic, sufferers of long-term symptoms received unparalleled attention from the medical community throughout the 1890s. With fewer experts, general practitioners paid more attention to the whole patient and wrote entire treatises on the flu’s longhaulers.


    Honigsbaum then offered some advice to the current medical community, which has been slow to recognize the scale and significance of long COVID: “As they adjust to the pandemic’s longue durée, physicians might find it helpful to look back to the Russian influenza and the historical accounts of the sequelae, even as COVID-19 longhaulers look to digital, patient-centred and activist forums for support and validation in the present.”


    A year later, Honigsbaum wrote that if the Russian flu pandemic was indeed due to a coronavirus that infected at least 60 per cent of the population, the experience does not auger well for the future.


    “Herd immunity does not appear to have been reached hence the recurrent waves of illness, marked by high mortality.”


    SCENE FOUR: BELGIUM, 2001

    Intrigued by the growing parallels between COVID-19 and the Russian flu pandemic, Harald Brüssow, another researcher at Leuven University, reviewed the medical literature on the 130-year-old outbreak, including Parson’s report.


    He found that Parsons wasn’t the only doctor to notice that the “Russian flu” behaved in weird ways. Or like COVID-19 today.


    Clinical data from German medical reports, for example, told a familiar story: “Neuralgic pain and prostration is prominent and for 92 per cent of the patients neurological complaints dominated the disease. Patients noted mostly headache, and less frequent back and muscle ache. A quarter of the patients were incapable of resuming their usual activity even without showing other symptoms of illness.”


    The Germans also reported episodes of blood-clotting, just as physicians have with COVID: “Phlebitis and thrombosis was frequently observed in the recovery phase, even deadly cases of sinus thrombosis occurred. Striking were cases of thrombosis in arteries.”


    Given that the Russian flu pandemic came in three waves, Brüssow speculated that they “might represent the appearance of variant viruses.”


    Reports from the 1890s also found crowding and insufficient ventilation led to mass infections. The sick overwhelmed hospitals and the military set up tents for the afflicted. Schools and universities closed. Mortality rates increased by 30 per cent compared to pre-pandemic years in some cities. In Madrid, the authorities ordered funerals to take place at night so as not to alarm the living.


    Brüssow also discovered that pandemic apparently re-emerged in 1900, killing a good number of physicians with a multi-organ disease. At the time, doctors tellingly classified this outbreak in The Lancet into four categories: One attacked the mucous membranes; another hit the gastrointestinal tract; a third attacked the heart; and a fourth targeted the nervous system. Patients suffered from shortness of breath, thrombi in the brain, loss of smell and even developed diabetes after being infected.


    The researcher offered a brief conclusion: “Since these observations resemble more of a COVID‐19 related disease than classical influenza, we must consider the possibility of a coronavirus‐induced pandemic in 1889–1890 and a resurgence of this pandemic 10 years later, peaking in 1900.”


    In a separate paper, Brüssow asked what the 1890 pandemic might tell us about the unpredictable progress of COVID.


    Given a divided global population of eight billion people armed unequally with a variety of medical interventions, “it is by no means clear whether an epidemic with similar base characteristics will be a replay of one which occurred 130 years ago,” he wrote.


    He added this sobering thought: “If the data from the end of the 19th century are an indication, COVID-19 may occupy us for a decade in multiple infection waves without much clinical attenuation if not stopped by vaccination programs that achieve herd immunity or breakthroughs in drug development which make COVID-19 a treatable disease with low mortality.”


    SCENE FIVE: UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA, 2021


    Convinced that coronaviruses have probably played a critical role in previous epidemics, a team of researchers form Arizona and Australia parsed the human genome for evidence.


    About 20,000 years ago, a coronavirus epidemic left an imprint on the DNA of people living today. The outbreak interacted with human genes in East Asia and left behind a calling card: antiviral modifications in at least 10 different human genes.


    The gene fortification only occurred in an East Asian population and probably required a lot of deaths for the human genome to respond with these modifications.


    The researchers concluded that ancient RNA virus epidemics have probably occurred frequently in human evolution.


    “It should make us worry,” David Enard, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, told the New York Times. “What is going on right now might be going on for generations and generations.” [Tyee]

    Controlled studies ease worries of widespread long Covid in kids


    Controlled studies ease worries of widespread long Covid in kids
    Children are more likely to suffer from pandemic-associated symptoms than from infection-associated symptoms. School policies should reflect this reality.
    www.statnews.com


    Uncertainty about the effect of Covid-19 on children is gradually being replaced by reassuring news.


    First, severe complications from Covid-19 are extremely rare in those under age 18. In Connecticut and Massachusetts, the states where we practice medicine, far fewer than 1% of those under age 18 diagnosed Covid have needed to be hospitalized, and that number is declining. Vaccines have proven immensely effective against the virus, in children and teens as well as in adults. This is grounds for relief, and even celebratio


    Yet a persistent fear, often focused on the potential for long Covid in kids, looms large for many parents, educational leaders, and even some students themselves. Because of this fear, pandemic-related restrictions like strict mask-wearing requirements persist for children in many places — even where they’ve been relaxed for adults.

    At the beginning of the pandemic, worries about long Covid in kids were not unreasonable. Initial reports suggested that some children with Covid-19 had symptoms like fatigue, cough, or problems sleeping that lasted for more than a few weeks. These wide-ranging symptoms, collectively termed long Covid, were reported as occurring in anywhere from 0% to 80% of children, and they could last for days or weeks

    The early reports, however, often lacked important information, such as whether the kids had co-existing medical conditions or whether they had ever taken a Covid test. Even so, these accounts of the possibility of long-lasting symptoms in children were important. They alerted us to the presence of a potential new health problem at a time when Covid-19 was an entirely new disease and no one really knew what symptoms or long-term effects to look out for.


    In scientific parlance, these reports were “hypothesis generating,” meaning they offered an idea of potential problems that would need to be studied more rigorously.


    What all of these early studies lacked was a control group. They included only children who reported having had Covid-19. This was a crucial limitation. Until these children could be compared to others who did not report having Covid-19, it was impossible to know whether their symptoms, like fatigue and poor sleep, were due to the virus or to the general stresses that children have been enduring during the pandemic — or even to chance.


    Over the last two years, experts’ understanding of long Covid in children has deepened. Several peer-reviewed studies now include control groups consisting of children who did not have Covid-19 but who have lived through the same pandemic conditions — loneliness, interrupted schooling, anxiety, tensions at home, the loss of loved ones, and the like.


    These studies indicate that long Covid in children is rare and, when it does occur, is short-lived. In one study, 97% of children ages 5 to 11 with Covid-19 recovered completely within four weeks. In the small group that had bothersome symptoms after four weeks (usually loss of smell or fatigue), most had fully recovered by eight weeks

    In two other studies that included scientific controls, the rates of long Covid symptoms were nearly the same in children who had tested positive for Covid-19 compared to those who didn’t. In other words, other factors were to blame in many or most of these cases.


    Indeed, children who had not had Covid-19 reported higher rates of many symptoms, including difficulty concentrating and muscle pains — nearly every long Covid symptom except the loss of smell and taste. Similar findings have also been reported in controlled studies in adults.


    To be sure, debilitating Covid-19 symptoms persist for weeks in a small number of children, likely due to lingering effects of infection and the body’s immune response to it. But the studies that include control groups tell us that the odds of this occurring in a child with Covid-19 is low, lower even than the odds of getting seriously injured while playing sports.


    Controlled studies like the CLoCk study in England, published in Lancet Child and Adolescent Health on Feb. 7, also offer crucial information about the mental health toll the Covid-19 pandemic has taken on children, regardless of whether they had personally been infected with the virus that causes Covid-19. An alarming 40% of teens surveyed — those who had Covid-19 and those who did not have it — reported feeling worried, sad, or unhappy. These mental health symptoms are real, but the data indicate that, more often than not, they are not a consequence of direct Covid-19 infection. Among those who did have Covid-19, poor mental health before getting Covid-19 was an important risk factor for having multiple long Covid symptoms after three months, highlighting the importance of accounting for mental health conditions in studies of pediatric long Covid

Subscribe to our newsletter

It's sent once a month, you can unsubscribe at anytime!

View archive of previous newsletters

* indicates required

Your email address will be used to send you email newsletters only. See our Privacy Policy for more information.

Our Partners

Supporting researchers for over 20 years
Want to Advertise or Sponsor LENR Forum?
CLICK HERE to contact us.