For younger populations under 70, it’s much milder.
An article from October 30, 2020 titled Seeking Common Ground in ‘Herd Immunity’ Debate quoted anti-vaccine, misinformation doctor Jay Bhattacharya as saying:
An infection is a severe problem for older populations, and also for people who have certain chronic conditions. For younger populations under 70, it’s much milder.
You can watch him state his case in this video clip from November 2020:
The full video is here.
Only a doctor who experienced the entire pandemic from his office would have made such an absurd statement- for younger populations under 70, it’s much milder– though COVID’s risk to young people, even those without medical conditions, was widely-publicized since the pandemic’s first days. Most famously, the heroic Chinese doctor who warned the world of COVID, Dr. Li Wenliang, died from it at age 34. As early as April 8th 2020, the Washington Post published an article titled Hundreds of Young Americans Have Now Been Killed by the Coronavirus, Data Shows. It began by saying:
Two weeks after her husband died alone in an intensive care unit in Fort Myers, Fla., Nicole Buchanan is quarantined at the home they shared with their 12-year-old daughter, wrestling not only with grief but also with why and how the coronavirus could steal someone so young and healthy.
“My husband didn’t have diabetes, he didn’t have asthma, he didn’t have high cholesterol. He didn’t have anything,” Buchanan said. “There’s just so much I’ll never know, that I’ll never get the answers to.”
Conrad Buchanan, who died at 39 on March 26 after battling the infection for nearly two weeks, was creative and goofy. A professional DJ, he could entertain huge crowds with his music. But at home, he was fond of singing Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” to his daughter, Skye. “He had an amazing sense of humor. He had a big laugh. He was so magnetic,” his 37-year-old widow said. “He was our universe.”
This article quoted a doctor who actually treated COVID patients as saying:
Just because they are young doesn’t mean they aren’t vulnerable.
Articles like this appeared regularly throughout the pandemic’s first year. An article titled Young and Middle-Aged People, Barely Sick With Covid-19, Are Dying of Strokes was also published in April 2020. An article from May 2020 titled 5-Year-Old Dies in New York City of Rare Illness Linked to Virus showed the virus could seriously hurt some young children too. Another article titled Dying Young: The Health Care Workers in Their 20s Killed by COVID-19 was published in August 2020. An article from November 2020 titled The Young Die As Well From COVID-19, Even As Many Engage In Denial quoted Dr. Nina Shapiro who said:
Those who are in terrific shape, are young and have no prior illness can, indeed, become critically ill
from COVID. Many have died and many will die.
By January 2021, the headlines read COVID-19 Has Killed Thousands Of Young Americans. This Is Not Just A Tragedy For The Elderly. COVID’s severe impact on some young people people was hardly some secret, and it’s important to remember there were real lives behind these dry statistics.
School closures may also diminish the chances of developing herd immunity in an age group that is spared serious disease.
Though when the virus was just a few months old, the proposition that COVID was benign for young people and that infecting them would lead to herd immunity was first formulated in March 2020 when Dr. John Ioannidis wrote:
School closures may also diminish the chances of developing herd immunity in an age group that is spared serious disease.
Foreshadowing Dr. Bhattacharya, Dr. Ioannidis said in an interview from April 2020 that the virus was benign for healthy people under age 65. He said:
For someone who is less than 65 and has no underlying diseases, the risk is completely negligible…it seems that these deaths are extremely exceptional, very unlikely.
You can watch him state his case in this video clip:
The full video is here.
The myth that COVID only threatened the elderly and infirm became the pandemic’s unquestionable central dogma for pro-infection doctors, and literally nothing the virus did could alter it- not Delta, not Omicron, nothing. I’ve never heard one of them say “Looking back, I underestimated COVID’s impact on people younger than age 70 and overestimated the value of natural immunity.” In fact, not only have these doctors never recognized that COVID could hurt some young people, many of them berated those of us who did nothing more than acknowledge this obvious truth. We were derided as “idiots” or scolded for supposedly behaving unprofessionally.
Throughout the pandemic, laptop class doctors who were sheltered from the consequences of their words, acted as if the virus was totally harmless for young people only because it was generally much worse for older people. For example, in their article, The Ill-Advised Push to Vaccinate the Young from June 2021, Dr. Bhattacharya, along with Dr. Martin Kulldorff, wrote:
The idea that everyone must be vaccinated against COVID-19 is as misguided as the anti-vax idea that no one should. The former is more dangerous for public health. The COVID-19 vaccines have been one of the few bright spots during this pandemic. While anyone can get infected, the old have a thousand-fold higher mortality risk than the young.
This is like saying sober drivers don’t need seat belts, because it’s more dangerous to drive drunk. Yet, this absurd “logic” shaped policy when it came to COVID, as did blatant falsehoods spread by doctors. For example, during the same interview posted above, Dr. Bhattacharya claimed more children had died of flu than COVID. In reality, the AAP reported 133 pediatric COVID fatalities by November 2020. There was a single pediatric flu death that flu season.
Though thousands of young people had already died of COVID by June 2021, when Drs. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff published their anti-vaccine article, the worst was yet to come. Worse variants arrived immediately after it was published, and COVID became a leading killer of young people in the second half of 2021. 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.
COVID was the number 1 cause of death for people 45-54 in 2021, and it was worse still for people age 55-70. It was hardly shocking news when a 60-year-old died of COVID, even if they were healthy. Though pro-infection doctors never considered adverse outcomes other than death, countless more people under 70 survived COVID, but were seriously hurt by it. There would have been many more such tragedies had 200 million unvaccinated Americans under age 70 simultaneously contracted COVID in October 2020 as Drs. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff proposed.
“For younger populations under 70, it’s much milder.“
For younger populations under 70, it’s much milder?
Despite all that’s happened, I’ve never heard Dr. Bhattacharya revisit his sentiment from the fall of 2020. He seems to have forgotten it entirely, and his sycophantic interviewers are never brave enough remind him of it. However, I’d like to see him make the case today that he was right back then when he said “For younger populations under 70, it’s much milder“, and that this was a responsible message to convey to the public right before before vaccines arrived. If history is any guide, instead of having the integrity to defend his own words, Dr. Bhattacharya will only feel victimized when people quote Dr. Bhattacharya.