From the esteemed National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, an article released a couple of days ago, titled:
Under-12s are increasingly catching COVID-19. How sick are they getting and when will we be able to vaccinate them?
In this article we have such statements as these:
“But where does that leave children under 12? We know they’re making up a large proportion of new infections in Australia’s current outbreaks, which was not the case last year.”
“Throughout the pandemic, fortunately, we’ve seen children are very unlikely to get severely unwell or die from COVID-19.”
“Cases are on the rise among children in New South Wales, but to date this hasn’t been accompanied by a large increase in paediatric hospitalisations.”
“While the Delta variant is more infectious than other strains of the coronavirus, and more kids are becoming infected, there’s not a scientific consensus at this stage that it’s causing more severe disease in children.”
and
“One of the complications of COVID-19 is long COVID where a person experiences lasting symptoms such as breathlessness, anxiety and “brain fog” (reductions in attention and concentration). Reassuringly, a recent study found only a small proportion of children had symptoms beyond four weeks after their initial COVID infection, and almost all children had recovered by eight weeks.”
but then, here it comes:
“What about collective benefits? Will vaccinating young children reduce transmission in the community and improve our herd protection?”
“High vaccine coverage in the community will also benefit children by reducing the need for lockdowns and school closures, which we know can have negative effects on their education, socialisation and mental health.”
Most parents I know would give their lives to protect a child. In fact, I knew one that did, and it wasn’t even his own child.
Even after admitting that Covid (Delta) remains an extremely small risk to children, despite rising cases numbers, these ‘adults’ seem intent on exposing them to unknown long term risks of a new vaccine, in the drive for some mythical ‘Herd Immunity’ measure. I call it unnecessary, cowardly and even exploitative.
Has there ever before been a vaccine given to children, that wasn’t specifically for their direct benefit, but rather ‘for the greater good’, and to free them from government imposed tyranny?
It’s a poor reflection of where our society is…not that I needed much more proof.
I’m all for it.
AFTER
Every political, bureaucratic, Big Business, Big Government, Big Union, Big Academia, Big MSM.. whatever proves that they and their entire families have had the ‘jab’.
Yea, to the very last.
Has Greg Hunt and his entire gene line and related had the ‘jab’?
When will they start drip feeding vaccines into new born babies?
this is tosh. There is clear evidence the young are not affected by this disease.
Mater,
I agree with your sentiments. This whole process is sucking the life out of our young, and potentially harming them, in order to scrounge some extra months for the elderly.
This is a repulsive statement. “Its your own fault your locked up!”
“High vaccine coverage in the community will also benefit children by reducing the need for lockdowns and school closures, which we know can have negative effects on their education, socialisation and mental health.”
The idea that our rulers could write this sentence without burning shame makes my f*cking blood boil.
If the children are not getting sick from Covid, surely natural immunity from the virus is the way to go?
When I raise this issue about people under 50, I generally have “Long Covid” thrown in my face. Well, the article clearly dismisses that as a concern.
Again, myself and my children are vaccinated up the wazoo (me more than most people), but they all had a purpose. This article leads me to belief we are regressing towards the days when they used to throw kids off cliffs to appease a deity, in the hope of resolving plague or pestilence.
Weasel stuff, designed to bamboozle.
They can measure one aspect but the other requires “consensus”*? Give me a break. Either the children infected are sick and exhibiting a range of symptoms or they aren’t.
As for ooga-booga “Long Covid”, it sounds scary but also sounds exactly like a typical post-viral disorder which many, myself included, have suffered. Mine lasted for years until my immune system got back to normal. Chronic fatigue syndrome is soooo last millennium.
* this is getting as bad as “Peer review” for climate garbage.
As soon as the government began making the vaccines about protecting other people – “we’re all in this together” – more than for the protection of the individual, this was always going to be the end result.
While most deaths have been in the elderly, the mass vaccination program, includes age groups who are not at risk. If they too can be drawn up into the great “corona net” then so too can the kids. For it is the logical (read illogical) end game of what is really the new man/woman in the new world order: “the empathetic citizen.”
When I was a boy, and a child caught mumps, German measles etc every child in the neighbourhood was paraded through their bedroom – it was well understood that these diseases were mild in children, but much more problematic in adults (I well remember an aging great aunt catching mumps and it was no joke at all!).
Today we have effective vaccination for these which also includes measles (which is absolutely no joke at all at whatever age – both my wife and I caught that badly when we were children … weeks in a darkened room, shudder).
Nonetheless, the principle is long accepted. More importantly, recent extensive studies in Israel indicate massively (17-25 times) enhanced immunity levels in those who caught COVID and recovered than in those vaccinated.
While I understand that there are some children with severely compromised immune systems who are require protection from all infection, In the vast majority of cases we are doing our children no favours at by attempting to protect them from infection wth COVID.
Schools should not only have remained open over the last two years, if we’d really cared about the children, we should have actively sent the infected to school.
Except the kiddies go home and infect grandma. This has been the beef of many – young lives compromised and damaged to protect the +60’s.
The logical move would gave been to immunise the elderly (purely voluntarily) and the infirm and simply let the thing travel through the community, slowly devolving into less lethal forms, while simultaneously developing treatments to ameliorate the worst symptoms. Instead, we’ve had media driven panic, based on the fear of death.
Add the political element, and we have a lethal cultural and economic cocktail that doesn’t appear to have any end in sight.
This virus despite the communists attempts is doing what mild-moderate viruses often do, knock off the weak and frail. That’s how nature works, wether it’s predators or viruses
The government should focus on these people not spread the misery far and wide.
I tend to agree with your comment – and of course it makes sense to allow the 60+ cohort the opportunity to accept a vaccination before encouraging/facilitating spread. The point at which the risk/reward analysis suggests vaccination is a personal choice.
Still, that point was reached many many months ago.
This, of course, is what we have done with the flu (and, indeed, MMR and all the rest of them) for decades.
As you know, calli, this was the early consensus at the old Cat as soon as it became empirically clear this thing was not the plague of death the media insisted it was. That we now have the deaths of people in their 90s who die with covid described as “tragic”by politicians and the media speaks volumes about where our society is morally and spiritually. If Xi’s intention – with the assistance of the supine WHO – was to expose the hollowness of the West – as some argue – he’s achieved his goal magnificently. The response to covid – not the virus itself – was a civilisational crisis and we failed.
Any information on reinfection rates for kids who’ve had the delta variant? Pretty low I’d imagine.
Roger,
A cynical mind might suggest it was a test. Either way, it has exposed the commitment the western nations have in defending certain rights, and the their casualty thresholds.
If I was contemplating conflict, I’d loooooove to go against an adversary who had such little morale, commitment to ideals and/or resilience. All wars are lost at home, before they are conceded at the front. The home front seems particularly adverse to casualties, and willing to accept anything to avoid them.
If our leaders are willing to remove the foundations of western civilisation over 5 cases of a virus, we are surely a walk over in the making. We should be making white flags, not masks.
Precisely, Mater.
I don’t think the virus was deliberately released, although I don’t doubt the Chinese would do that if they deemed it necessary. But I do think that once it was out, Xi was determined to use it to his advantage. It certainly took the wind out of Trump’s sails, alas.
Like clockwork, the Age today runs a think piece on the front page saying: just because Andrews has now given up on the zer0-case strategy don’t you dare make the mistake of thinking the last year of lockdowns was somehow completely pointless.
And I also see that, with apparently zero fanfare, a drug treatment for mild COVID is being rolled out in Shepparton. B-but I thought drug treatments for COVID were unpossible! Only believed in by wild-eyed Facebook conspiracy loons!
At the outset the news coming out of Wuhan / China were dire. People falling over in the streets, whole building complexes infected with doors welded shut, crematoriums with trains of dead backed up for miles, and mass burial pits dug all over the place.
None. Of. This. Was True.
It’s obvious the virus is a lot milder than the first news suggested. Nowhere else has what supposedly happened in China been seen… But the narrative has continued that it is worse than anything else, and has even been exacerbated [see Palazxcxzsk fear mongering]. The media will not admit they were wrong, the governments ditto and all complicated by the politicisation of the virus to damage Trump.
No one can take a step back. Probably coz the polling/focus groups say that there will be more votes lost by admitting mishandling/lying and so destroying lives and livelihoods through lockdowns etc. In fact having thousands dying of the virus gives the pollies cover: See how dangerous this is – we wuz right to kill the economy! [And – tin foil hat on – why every death is classified as being from the virus and not from the comorbidity (even people in paliative care are dying from the virus!), there is little or no treatment of the ill (aside of shoving the death tube in), and even prevention of investigation into possible prophylaxis (convalescent plasma / ivermectin etc)]
There is no honesty.
There’s an article in the Australian, “Covid-19’s legacy risks being a generational clash across Europe”.
This was, of course, entirely predictable, if not the point of the whole covid project.
There’s the usual “far-right” smear, but they’ve miscued by associating the “far-right” with freedom.
Most of the ‘oldies’ responding are quite indignant. Here’s a great comment by Macbeth, whose matbe the Macbeth that comments on the Cat occasionally?
I use ‘crisis’ here not in the modern sense of a dangerous event or moment in time calling for an urgent response but in the biblical Greek sense of a trial or contest which results in a judgment.
This is victim blaming of the highest order.
In the absence of constant contact with others, getting up to all the things kids get up to and doing extremely unhealthy things, current kids, future adults, will have shithouse immune systems. Klaus is going to get them one way or the other.
That would have been the logical and rational thing to do but where’s the fun in that? And no matter how dour and frowning Gladys and Kerry Chant look during the 11 o’clock media scrum they are having the time of their lives.