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.

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.