Horowitz: Are children in the hospital for RSV, not COVID, BECAUSE of lockdowns?



When King Ahab of the Bible murdered his neighbor to take possession of his vineyard, Elijah admonished him, "Have you killed and also taken possession?" (1 Kings 21:19). Well, it appears that those who promoted lockdowns rather than early outpatient treatment as the solution for COVID are once against benefiting from a phenomenon that they likely caused, now using it to falsely instill more panic about children being in danger from COVID.

Isn't it too convenient? Right when schools are slated to start again, the proponents of lockdowns and masks seem to have finally gotten traction on a narrative of children filling up the hospitals with COVID — a phenomenon not seen in any other country. As Alasdair Munro, a pediatric infectious disease doctor in the U.K. observed in exasperation, the U.S. is the only country that seems to be panicking over pediatric Delta infections.

Almost every western country now has Delta as the predominant variant of #SARSCoV2 I'm trying to understand why t… https://t.co/SK0BKSjTGc

— Alasdair Munro (@apsmunro) 1628427530.0

The cynical answer is that politics is a greater blood sport in the United States than anywhere else on earth, so there is a constant to need to manipulate anecdotes and data to achieve a political agenda, in this case shutting down schools or masking kids right at the start of the new academic year. However, any lie is built on a kernel of truth. In this case, the purveyors of panic are getting a timely assist from a legitimate concern about respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a common childhood virus we've lived with forever that has likely gotten worse because of the very policies they intend to push by exploiting this new narrative.

As you can see from this chart, courtesy of Bio Fire, we are experiencing a massive out-of-season surge in cases of RSV, which is actually outpacing COVID in terms of positivity rate of lab-confirmed tests. Anyone can get RSV, but it is usually only dangerous to some infants and young children. According to the CDC, 58,000 children are hospitalized every year from the virus. We already know that the virus is raging particularly strong in the South and that hospitals are already reporting an unnatural surge in pediatric RSV cases.

Now, it doesn't take a genius to realize that a large number of kids who come to the hospital for RSV in the South will wind up getting COVID in the hospital. My contention was always that kids don't get seriously ill from COVID and are not primary transmitters, but they absolutely can and do get the virus, especially during periods of spread and especially in the hospital.

We already know from a doctor in Miami that 50% of the vaccinated patients in the hospital who are counted as COVID patients are not really there for COVID. This has to be doubly true for the unvaccinated, especially kids. Most hospitals have a policy of automatically COVID testing those who were not vaccinated, even if they come in for a kidney stone or a surgery. All children under 12 are unvaccinated and would thus be tested, yet they are the most unlikely to be in the hospital because of COVID. Given the surge in RSV sending them to the hospital, it is nearly impossible that a significant number of the documented "pediatric COVID hospitalizations" aren't completely bogus.

In general, a study published in the Journal of American Academy of Pediatrics found, "Nearly one-half of the infected children had coinfection with other common respiratory pathogens." One can then surmise that in an area of prolific spread of COVID but also high rates of RSV, those numbers of co-infection will be even higher. But in the case of children, the reason they are seriously ill is almost certainly not COVID, but RSV, for the same reason why RSV is surging so much out of season.

The NPR affiliate in Oklahoma recently reported on the surge in pediatric RSV hospitalizations in the state and quoted Dr. Steven Nye, the pediatrics department chair at Integris Health in Oklahoma City, as to the theory behind the unnatural surge.

"Kids and babies who really, if they were born during COVID, haven't been exposed to any viral illnesses throughout their entire life," he said. "And now suddenly they're thrown into, you know, it's like when a kid first starts daycare, they're sick every other week."

Dr. Derek Jones at Family Medicine Center in Huntington, West Virginia, has seen a similar trend with the uptick in RSV hospitalizations in his area. "Where kids had not been exposed to their normal viral load that they are typically exposed to throughout the year, once they got back together and people started to be exposed to these viruses again, we've seen a huge increase," he said. "The kids are sicker than usual because their immune systems hadn't got the little exposures that tweak their antibodies throughout the year, so these kids are quite sick when they're catching RSV."

"These kids have been so well-protected, they haven't been exposed," said Dr. Erin Hauck, the vice chief of Our Lady of the Lake's pediatrics division, about the uptick in RSV cases in Louisiana hospitals.

Dr. David Kimberlin, co-director of the division of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told NBC that the RSV wave in Alabama has "exceeded our worst winters in terms of RSV hospitalization."

Dr. Roberto Ayers, a pulmonologist in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, observed that "fifty percent of all tested babies that have symptoms are positive for RSV." "We usually start the season at 10 percent and we keep it open at 10 percent; we are at 50 percent like if we're in the middle of January or February," said Ayers. "It's really bad."

The latest CDC surveillance data on COVID hospitalizations seem to harmonize with the theory that they are counting RSV admissions as COVID.

As you can see, while the pediatric hospitalizations have gone up, they are still below the winter levels, and nobody suggested back then that kids were flooding the hospital with illness. However, notice that the 0-4 cohort spiked relatively quicker than the 5-17 cohort. That is what we would expect to see if RSV, not COVID, is the main driver of the hospitalizations.

Thus, the "experts" rejected God's gift of partial immunity from COVID, itself brought on by early childhood exposure to viruses, and turned the kids into bubble children who are now vulnerable to viruses we've long lived with. Then, they have the temerity to ascribe those hospitalizations to COVID – not their own odious response – and use it as a pretext to further isolate kids. Rinse and repeat the cycle of immunocompromised hell.

There's a reason why "Bubble Boy" is a fictional movie, not a way of life.

Horowitz: Governors and legislatures must declare war on the CDC



All Republican governors claim they support limited government and will stand up to the tyrannical feds. Well, now is their time to shine.

The CDC announced a return to the failed masking recommendations after the shots it continues to push apparently didn't do the job. Most shockingly, it announced a recommendation that all children – whether they got the shots or not – should wear a mask indefinitely all day in school.

This is a watershed moment in American history. The CDC is now recommending an illogical, inhumane, immoral, and illegal policy that in any other era would violate the Americans with Disabilities Act and would be considered child abuse. The response of the states should be an emphatic "Hell no!"

The CDC is using the "scariant" Delta as an excuse to give people the impression that suddenly children are at risk for the virus. Well, the U.K. has just gotten over the curve of the Delta wave, so its data is likely to be very instructive as to what we should expect in the next few weeks. As U.K. Dr. Alasdair Munro, a pediatric infectious disease researcher, observed, children 2-11 actually experienced the lowest case rate during the Delta wave as compared to young adults who were eligible for the vaccine. Obviously, almost all those remaining cases were very mild.

WowDespite incessant claims of schools driving this wave, and Delta disproportionately affecting children scaring… https://t.co/e1Ycr2n8nz

— Alasdair Munro (@apsmunro) 1627043806.0

Perhaps most ironic is that the U.K.'s case count peaked on July 19, "Freedom Day," when all restrictions and mask mandates ended. Cases have dropped precipitously every day since then and are now down 50% in one week. As we have witnessed in every corner of the world since the beginning of the pandemic — Delta being no different — nothing has worked to stop the inexorable six- to eight-week waves, and nothing works to restart the spread when its seasonal spread is done in a given area. It's 100% natural. But now, even the establishment can no longer deny it. As professor Oliver Johnson of Bristol University observed in the U.K. Spectator, "For the first time in 18 months, there's been a fall in cases that can't be easily explained by a national lockdown."

Well everyone, cases are rapidly declining in the UK, so it appears that “Freedom Day” and the removal of mask mand… https://t.co/pYBm1RYjtJ

— IM (@ianmSC) 1627232421.0

Of course, here in the United States we have seen this trend for months, especially this past spring, when cases in the South plummeted for weeks after they ditched the mask mandates but rose quickly in the Northeast and Michigan with impervious mask mandates.

It’s been nearly two months since Texas lifted its mask mandate and most restrictions to overwhelming expert and me… https://t.co/2mAhFkPuQJ

— IM (@ianmSC) 1620432188.0

As much as masks don't work to stop the spread of COVID (especially an even more transmissible form), to force children to bear the brunt of the mandate by wearing the sacred cloth all day in school is unconscionable. Just how big a waste were the quarantines of children last year? According to a recent Oxford study, out of the millions of children who were forced to isolate because a child tested positive for a virus milder to them than the flu, 98.4% of U.K. children never went on to develop COVID. All of that child abuse was for nothing.

Now the CDC is seeking to reinstate its child abuse without performing any randomized controlled trials on the efficacy or safety of masks, after it rejected the findings of the only studies that actually looked at those questions and raised serious concerns.

Will red states allow the CDC to continue this child abuse for another year? Well, it's in their power to say no. Several governors, including from Florida, Texas, South Dakota, South Carolina, Nebraska, and Iowa, have already said this mandate is a non-starter in their states, but given the prominence of the CDC, I fear more emphatic and broader actions are required. State legislatures should immediately convene and pass the following:

  • A law barring the implementation of the CDC's mask mandate in any public or private setting. Private institutions are forced to abide by OSHA, ADA, and anti-discrimination, as well as health privacy laws in every other context. Why should they be exempt the one time such mandates are clearly being driven by the government and not the free market?
  • A law designating forced masking of children as reckless child endangerment, subject to any civil or criminal penalties pursuant to their respective state statutes.
  • Guidance for their respective departments of health to reject every policy of HHS that is built upon the faulty science of masking, the existing shots, test and trace, and the use of ineffective treatments such as remdesivir. All state COVID funding should be eliminated from enforcing, marketing, or advertising any policy the legislature deems unlawful or unscientific.
  • Guidance to administer ivermectin to those in need or to make it available over the counter.

It's for this very moment that our founders believed our federalist system would help deter a national tyranny. In Federalist 46, Madison envisioned state interposition against federal tyranny:

The disquietude of the people; their repugnance and, perhaps, refusal to co-operate with the officers of the Union; the frowns of the executive magistracy of the State; the embarrassments created by legislative devices, which would often be added on such occasions, would oppose, in any State, difficulties not to be despised; would form, in a large State, very serious impediments; and where the sentiments of several adjoining States happened to be in unison, would present obstructions which the federal government would hardly be willing to encounter.

Even Hamilton, a strong proponent of a strong federal government, wrote in Federalist 26 that the state legislatures will lead the charge against federal tyranny:

The State legislatures, who will always be not only vigilant but suspicious and jealous guardians of the rights of the citizens against encroachments from the federal government, will constantly have their attention awake to the conduct of the national rulers, and will be ready enough, if any thing improper appears, to sound the alarm to the people, and not only to be the VOICE, but, if necessary, the ARM of their discontent.

Now is the time for all these red-state Republicans to stand up and be counted. Will they stand for human life, the Constitution, and the health and dignity of our children? Or will they stand for a double-speaking, power-hungry, attention-seeking fool who has articulated less scientific acumen than a toddler?

Don't you believe in science? https://t.co/yljNGP4Bjm

— Maze (@mazemoore) 1627343334.0