AND ON it goes. Our old favourite Global Health Now (newsletter of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University) of October 2 had a link to MedicalXpress summarising a Lancet Infectious Diseases article investigating the link between long covid and reinfection in children and adolescents. Apparently, there is nothing to worry about . . . only joking.
The title of the article on MedicalXpress claimed that the ‘Risk of long covid in children may be twice as high after a second infection’. Note the use of ‘may’ which, as usual, does a lot of the heavy lifting in the title. As usual, without questioning the integrity of the authors of the study or the raw figures, the results are worth considering.
The study is huge, comparing 407,300 children after a first covid infection with 58,417 who had a second infection. And young people with two infections do appear to have about double the risk of long covid compared with those infected once.
As ever, note the use of ‘relative’ rather than ‘absolute’ risk here as is common in other covid studies, especially vaccine studies where relative risk or relative risk reduction in the case of the vaccines can sound much more worrying or impressive, depending on what the authors are trying to sell. In fact, the absolute risk here (0.09 per cent for a first infection and 0.19 per cent for a second infection) increases by only 0.1 per cent.
This represents an increase of 980 cases per million young people having a second dose of covid. Or expressed another way, 0.098 per cent. Suddenly, while there is undoubtedly something wrong with the children reporting symptoms described as long covid, the situation does not seem like an especially big deal.
The solution, as you may have expected, is to vaccinate more children and adolescents. As readers of TCW will be aware, there is no strong case for vaccinating young people against covid. In fact, given the low efficacy of the covid vaccines and the accumulating evidence about harms, there is barely a case for vaccinating anyone with covid vaccines. Young people are barely at risk from covid and the figures presented here are not convincing enough. This appears to be another example of long covid being used as a battering ram to increase anxiety about covid and an excuse to vaccinate more people.
To their credit, the authors of the Lancet study do acknowledge a wide range of limitations to their data. Several alternative explanations may account for why reinfection appears to double the risk of long covid in children and adolescents. One possibility is that children who become reinfected may already have underlying vulnerabilities, such as chronic health conditions, immunological issues or increased healthcare contact, that both predispose them to reinfection and make them more likely to receive a long covid diagnosis.
Differences in healthcare may also play a role, since children with prior infection may be more closely monitored, increasing the likelihood of long covid being detected after reinfection. Diagnostic practices present another challenge, as ‘long covid’ remains variably defined and coded, with greater clinical awareness in later pandemic waves possibly inflating apparent risk among reinfections.
Finally, socio-behavioural factors cannot be ignored: children living in crowded households or communities with high transmission risk are more likely to be reinfected and may also face socioeconomic and environmental stressors that correlate with poorer health outcomes. Together, these factors suggest that at least part of the observed risk increase may reflect confounding influences rather than reinfection alone.
However, while covid vaccination status was accounted for in the study, there was no hint of the possibility that the covid vaccines may be responsible for at least some of the ‘long covid’ symptoms reported. The majority in both groups, those only infected one and those infected again, were unvaccinated at 78 per cent in the first group and 74 per cent in the second group.
Therefore, the second group were 4 per cent more vaccinated than the first group and, since was no comparison between vaccinated and unvaccinated outcomes is presented, it is possible that the covid vaccines may have played some causative role in the greater level of symptoms in the second group. As the increased symptoms allegedly caused by reinfection included myocarditis, thromboembolism and kidney injury which are all associated with covid vaccine harms, this is a major flaw.
Moreover, the authors found that the increased risk of long covid after reinfection persisted in both vaccinated and unvaccinated children and adolescents, suggesting the reinfection effect was consistent regardless of vaccination. If that is the case then what exactly would the point be of, as the authors advocate, ‘the need to promote vaccination in younger populations’?
What lingers behind so much of this is not the science but the economics. There is a vast market in continuing to vaccinate children and adolescents against a disease from which they face minimal risk, and every new study hinting at danger serves to keep that market alive. Pharmaceutical companies, research groups and public health bureaucracies all stand to profit from the endless promotion of covid vaccines. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that financial incentives, more than medical necessity, lie behind the insistence on vaccinating the young.
