A Mom Speaks Truth
Kelley Krohnert is fact-checking the experts on the impact of covid on pediatric mortality - and getting it right
I’m writing this post to elevate & augment the brilliant fact-checking of my truth-seeking friend and fellow mom, Kelley Krohnert. Her work speaks for itself; please read her important blog post first.
(ICYMI, journalist Jennifer Block wrote a cogent piece for The BMJ a few months ago on the CDC’s persistent issues with accurately reporting the number of pediatric deaths attributed to covid-19, including the role that Kelley played in drawing attention to the agency’s data failure.)
Thanks to Kelley’s tenacity this week - and validation of her work from the likes of Vinay Prasad and Alasdair Munro - the lead author of a problematic “study” says he and his colleagues will update their pre-print, taking some of the feedback into account.
This is progress, and I hope Kelley gets the credit she deserves for catching blatant errors that both the authors and the members of the CDC and FDA vaccination committees missed.
My concern is that, based on the third post in his thread, Dr. Flaxman & colleagues don’t place the data in the proper mortality context.
Let me explain:
Covid-19 has not increased the respiratory disease mortality burden among children. I’ve posted data to this effect numerous times on Twitter - most recently here - but few people seem to grasp what I’m showing.
Because the Flaxman et al analysis was presented at meetings focused on the age 0-4 vaccine, I’ll show only those age groups here.
Whether we’re looking at raw numbers or crude rates per 100K, we can see that, at most, deaths among infants and toddlers that have attributed covid-19 as underlying cause have displaced other kinds of respiratory-disease deaths.
Crude rates account for population changes, but it’s still worth noting that the U.S. has seen a decline in population for this age group, which corresponds with the declining birth rate.
Breaking out the infants, we see the same thing: Statistically-speaking, covid-19 has little to no impact on the respiratory disease death burden in this group. This is GOOD NEWS and in no way supports a blanket EUA for vaccination all babies.
Unfortunately, people tend to see the “red deaths” in the bar graphs above as “extra,” “wrongful,” or tragedies that would not have occurred if covid weren’t on the scene.
But both individual deaths reported in the media and those @snorwood has assiduously documented from the CDC’s Multiple Causes of Death database paint a clearer picture of exactly which children are dying with or from covid. (See age 0-4 only here.)
It’s largely not otherwise healthy kids. The CDC knows this - and they have access to data that reveals how big a role covid played in each death (if any), and which conditions made these deceased children more likely to die in 2020 or 2021, irrespective of covid.
One would think that organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics know this as well — and would use what doctors are and aren't seeing in clinical settings to assuage parental fears and speak honestly about the near-zero risk covid-19 presents to almost every child.
And yet, here we are, two years+ past spring 2020 - when we knew this virus spared pediatric age groups from debilitating disease or death - using bad interpretations of publicly-accessible data to justify emergency approval of a vaccine that has no direct medical benefit to all but the fewest toddlers and infants.
God help us — and God give us more Moms like Kelley, who seek the truth, find it, and speak it.
UPDATE: See The Epoch Times and National Review articles on this story.
See also Matt Shapiro’s Substack for analysis.