“No, young adults should not live in fear from coronavirus.”
I can’t stop thinking about the essay No, Young Adults Should Not Live in Fear from Coronavirus by Drs. John Mandrola and Andrew Foy, two so-called “medical conservatives”. It was written on December 29th, 2020 in response to a research letter titled All-Cause Excess Mortality and COVID-19–Related Mortality Among US Adults Aged 25-44 Years, March-July 2020, which found that 4,535 COVID deaths were recorded among young adults during the pandemic’s first 5-months.
Many people were sad that 4,535 young people had died from COVID in such a short time, especially considering there had been just 4.49 million confirmed cases of COVID by the end of July 2020.
Full article here
These “medical conservatives”, however, were unperturbed by thousands of dead young people. They castigated those who were concerned, decrying their “fearsome messaging.” “The infection fatality rate for young adults is quite low,” they said reassuringly. They sought to numb their readers by encouraging them to focus on the tens of millions of young adults who hadn’t died of COVID, while ignoring that the vast majority of them had yet to contract it. They wrote:
We offer four reasons why this study and OpEd do not support the claim that young adults should live in fear from the virus…
An excess of 12,000 deaths sounds bad, but Professor Don Boudreaux, from George Mason University, has noted that there are nearly 88 million people in this age group. Thus, the individual risk for a person this age is found by dividing 4,560 (the number dead from COVID19 in this study) by 88 million. This equates to a 0.0052% risk of dying from COVID19.
Of course, anything that kills young people can be made to sound trivial by dividing it by 88 million. The individual risk of dying at all is low for young people.
The authors were very concerned that young people might overestimate their risk of COVID and try too hard to avoid it. They pointed out that “COVID19 deaths in this age group are much less common than opioid overdose deaths” and therefore concluded that “fear of death” was not a valid reason for young people to try to avoid the virus (fallacy of relative privation). They did not consider adverse COVID outcomes other than death, even though serious injuries had been widely-reported in young people since the start of the pandemic.
However, despite knowing that COVID killed 4,535 young adults in just 5-months and that only a relatively small percentage had been infected, these doctors told them their “fear of death” was misplaced. Moreover, they chose to convey this incautious message at the start of the pandemic’s deadliest wave- COVID killed 95,000 Americans in January 2021- and two months earlier, a CDC report found that infections in young people invariably spill out into the wider community. It found:
Younger adults likely contribute to community transmission of COVID-19. Across the southern United States in June 2020, increases in percentage of positive SARS-CoV-2 test results among adults aged 20–39 years preceded increases among those aged ≥60 years by 4–15 days.
On the bright side, vaccination campaigns had started just two weeks before these “medical conservatives” wrote their article. Millions of Americans would be vaccinated over the next few months.
It’s hard to think of a worse time for respected doctors to have told young people they need not “fear” the virus.
“COVID-19 is a leading cause of death in children and young people in the US.”
A lot has happened since then.
The Delta and Omicron variants arrived within a year, and COVID became a leading cause of death for young people. In fact, COVID was the number 1 or 2 killer of young adults age 35-44 for six months in a row, from August 2021 to January 2022. It was the number 2 killer of adults age 25-34 for 5 out of 6 months during that time, and a top 10 killer for people younger than this. In total, around 45,000 people age 44 or younger, many of them unvaccinated, have now died of COVID in the US.
It’s worth remembering there were real lives behind these statistics. The mother of Dr. Adeline Fagan, a 28-year-old doctor who died of COVID, said:
To those who don’t believe, tell them to call me. Because I have pictures of Adeline gasping for air, of being chalk-white, turning blue in the mouth and being hooked up to every possible machine known to mankind. It has wrecked our lives. It has permanently put a hole not only in my heart, my husband’s heart, but our children’s. Her siblings. They will never be the same.
The mother of Michael Lang said:
Eighteen years old and his future ahead of him. That part of it is hard to wrap our brains around — that he won’t be with us any longer.
Michael, who died of COVID-myocarditis, “had no preexisting conditions and had never been in the hospital prior to COVID-19.”
Full article here
Countless other young people survived COVID, but were gravely injured by it. Claire “Clurby” Bridges, a 21-year-old aspiring model, lost both of her legs to COVID. Al Brown, a healthy 31-year-old man needed a heart transplant. Jose Luis Chavez, a 17-year-old, needed a double lung transplant. Lucas Denault, a high-school senior, had his life turned upside down by Long COVID.
Of course, all this was reflects what actually happened. There would have been many more such tragedies had hundreds of millions of young people, none of whom were vaccinated in December 2020, lived with zero fear of COVID, as “medical conservatives” instructed them.
Source: CDC
“Vaccine-Induced Myocarditis Concerns Demand Respect.”
Despite COVID becoming a leading killer of young people, these doctors have not updated their article from 2020. As such, we can assume they still feel they were wise to have advised unvaccinated young people not to fear the virus. Presumably, they still feel that COVID’s cumulative toll on this population remains firmly in the category of “things that should not be feared.” 45,000 dead young people, many of whom might still be alive had doctors communicated the importance of getting vaccinated, is not yet high enough to meet their threshold for something anyone should worry about.
Yet, for some inexplicable reason, these doctors- and there are many like them- feel perfectly entitled to pontificate about risks that fall well short of their own threshold of concern. Incredibly, the same doctor who wrote No, Young Adults Should Not Live in Fear from Coronavirus also wrote an error-filled article titled Vaccine-Induced Myocarditis Concerns Demand Respect, just 6-months later. He wanted his readers to “respect” the thing that wouldn’t kill them, but not to “fear” the thing that might. He wrote:
Calling myocarditis mild reminds me of the saying about minor surgery. Minor surgery is surgery on someone else; mild myocarditis is something that happens to other folks’ kids. Humans have only one heart; inflaming it at a young age is not a small thing.
But why isn’t it a small thing? I mean really, what’s the worst that could happen- someone might die? Is potential death worse than literal death? Some doctors think so, as long as the vaccine is to blame.
However, it seems to me that once a doctor has minimized literal death for young people, they’ve forfeited their right to be taken seriously when they sanctimoniously demand we “respect” a rare, usually mild vaccine-side effect. Indeed, once a doctor has minimized a disease that killed 45,000 young people and seriously injured many more, they’ve forfeited their right to be taken seriously when they opine on any topic less consequential than this.
Full article here