Note: While this series addresses unnecessary harm to kids from getting vaccinated, Dr. Robert Malone has just released recent data on how the CDC mask mandates harm the health of children.
As mentioned in the first part of this series, COVID does not represent a signficant health threat to children. When looking at data in 45 countries, the estimated infection fatality rate (IFR) for kids from age 5 to age 14 was 0.001%, with a 95% upper bound — i.e., a plausible upper limit on the most lethal that COVID can be for children — of 0.002%.
For comparison to flu, keep in mind that the CDC ‘Burden of Flu’ entries which are published show only symptomatic cases but not total infections (including asymptomatic flu infections which never rose to the level of a symptomatic case of flu).
Using a ‘symptomatic/asymptomatic’ correction factor on published CDC data for the age group of 5 to 17, the seasonal IFRs for 7 recent years are below:
Year …… IFR
2012/13: 0.011%
2013/14: 0.001%
2014/15: 0.005%
2015/16: 0.002%
2016/17: 0.002%
2017/18: 0.006%
2018/19: 0.002%
As you can see, in all but one season (“2013/14”), flu had a higher IFR for kids than COVID does. This means that COVID is not as dangerous for kids as flu is. With kids, COVID is less dangerous than flu.
Here are the data from Estonia showing that, even just getting a little more than 15% of the kids vaccinated against COVID, led to the highest ever weekly excess death rate:
The scale at left is the percentage increase from expected, using the baseline of 2015-2019 to derive expected death counts for all 52 weeks of the year. A level of 900% means that child deaths were 10 times greater than expected for that week (100% excess = twice what was expected).
Excess death in children in Estonia is admittedly volatile though, and there are even valleys dipping below the bottom cutoff of the graph, though not very far below the bottom.
Even still, COVID vaccines for kids led to more than double the peak weekly excess death rate vs. the excess death which was observed before vaccines rolled out for them.
Reference
[95% upper bound on the IFR for kids under age 15 = 0.002%] — O'Driscoll M, Ribeiro Dos Santos G, Wang L, Cummings DAT, Azman AS, Paireau J, Fontanet A, Cauchemez S, Salje H. Age-specific mortality and immunity patterns of SARS-CoV-2. Nature. 2021 Feb;590(7844):140-145. doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2918-0. Epub 2020 Nov 2. PMID: 33137809. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0
[Past seasons CDC reports of symptomatic flu infections and flu deaths by age] — CDC. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
[16% of all flu infections remain asymptomatic; 84% of them progress to symptoms] — Leung NH, Xu C, Ip DK, Cowling BJ. Review Article: The Fraction of Influenza Virus Infections That Are Asymptomatic: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Epidemiology. 2015 Nov;26(6):862-72. doi: 10.1097/EDE.0000000000000340. PMID: 26133025; PMCID: PMC4586318. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4586318/
[Share of people with at least one dose COVID-19 vaccine by age] — OWID. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
[P-scores by age group using five-year average baseline] — OWID. https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid