Even though this thing has killed less than you know, or, or about as many as flu would kill in a normal year in kids, I say hardly any.
Most of my writing has focused on how doctors minimized COVID for children and young people. To pick one example amongst many, in April 2021, Dr. Zubin Damania (ZDoggMD) absurdly compared COVID’s pediatric death toll with mitigation measures in place, to flu’s pediatric death toll without mitigation measures. In a podcast titled Focused Protection For COVID with pro-infection misinformation doctor Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Damania minimized the threat of variants and said:
Even though this thing has killed less than you know, or, or about as many as flu would kill in a normal year in kids, I say hardly any.
Around 300 children had died of COVID by April 2021– hardly any– though the worst was yet to come. The variants that Dr. Damania casually dismissed arrived within a year killing many more children. Naturally, Dr. Damania did not consider adverse outcomes aside from death.
And if you look at a population of 80-year-olds, their time to death in general is not that long.
Because Drs. Damania and like-minded doctors believed that measures to contain the virus posed a greater threat than the virus itself, they needed a different technique to numb their audience to the deaths of older people.
In a podcast titled Omicron Panic, Natural Immunity, Fluvoxamine, & More from December 2021, just before the Omicron variant took off. Dr. Damania, along with fellow misinformation doctors Vinay Prasad and Marty Makary, shamed and mocked anyone who wanted a booster, even though there was evidence from an RCT that it prevented 95% of COVID cases. Dr. Makary falsely claimed that the booster’s only benefit was that it would lower the hospitalization rate from 1 in 26,000 to 1 in 260,000 in people older than age 65. He added that “the average age of a breakthrough death is 80″, to which Dr. Damania replied:
And if you look at a population of 80-year-olds, their time to death in general is not that long.
Several months later, the New York Times added a sober dose of reality to their jocular fantasy with an article titled During the Omicron Wave, Death Rates Soared for Older People that said:
Almost as many Americans 65 and older died in four months of the Omicron surge as did in six months of the Delta wave, even though the Delta variant, for any one person, tended to cause more severe illness.
Many of these seniors might still be alive today had they lived with a bit more “panic” and opted for a simple booster.
These are everyday people who are dying. They’re losing time with their kids, their grandkids, their opportunities to build their futures.
Not all doctors were so blasé about COVID’s victims, young and old alike. Doctors who actually treated COVID patients know many of them had their lives shortened by several decades. As Dr. Nina Shapiro said in November 2020:
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.
Research supports the observations of frontline doctors. One study from October 2020 calculated that the virus had stolen 2.5 million years of potential life in the US. Just under half of these years were taken from people younger than 65 years. As the paper’s author, Dr. Stephen J. Elledge said, “COVID-19 has wiped out millions of years of productive, active, and happy existence.”
Later variants would pose a greater risk to younger people, especially the Delta variant. In fact, the number of years of life lost for each COVID death increased by 35.7% in 2021 compared to 2020. Another study from May 2022 calculated the virus had stolen 3.9 million years of life away from Americans and the average COVID victim lost over 9 years of life. Not all COVID victims were 90-year-olds with advanced cancer, only days away from dying, when they happened to test positive for SARS-CoV-2 as some doctors implied. In the words of Dr. Utibe Essien:
These are everyday people who are dying. They’re losing time with their kids, their grandkids, their opportunities to build their futures.
No one lives forever, and I certainly know that someone who receives more medical care hasn’t necessarily received better medical care. However, if my older relatives are hospitalized with COVID, I hope doctors don’t just casually discard them as old people whose time has come. I hope someone with Dr. Essien’s compassion is looking out for them.
Which of the 1.1 million COVID deaths should we care about?
Beyond this, Drs. Damania’s callous dismissal of COVID fatalities of both children and seniors- and he was hardly alone in doing this- raises an obvious question. If were are supposed to be indifferent to the deaths of young people because “hardly any” died, and we are supposed to be indifferent to the deaths of older people because “their time to death in general is not that long“, which of the 1.1 million COVID deaths should we care about?