You know how sometimes you catch someone in a lie, and so they tell
an even bigger lie to try and cover up the first lie they told?
Well, that’s happening right now.
Last
winter, a handful of celebrity doctors went on mainstream news networks
to assure us that Omicron was “mild.” They carpet-bombed us with
articles and tweets, doing their best to brainwash everyone.
They were wrong.
In the end, real science junked that idea. An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that Omicron killed more people
than previous variants, even when adjusting for other factors. Another
study by doctors at Massachusetts General and Harvard Medical found that
Omicron was just as deadly.
In fact, “the risks of hospitalization and mortality were nearly
identical.” As it turns out, the entire idea of “mild” Omicron was based
on an old, flawed idea known as the law of declining virulence,
developed by a doctor who was studying tick-borne disease in cows. It
was debunked decades ago.
Most epidemiologists know that viruses don’t magically evolve to become milder. Virus evolution is random and chaotic.
In some cases, viruses evolve to become more deadly.
A handful of actual scientists tried to explain all this last winter, including disease experts at Johns Hopkins. A handful of other established experts spoke out against this myth. As a microbiologist at Penn State told Politifact,
“You can’t just say it’s going to become nicer.” They were largely
ignored, because everyone already sort of believed the misinformation.
If they knew it was based on a study about cows, they probably would’ve
thought twice.
This year, the makers of “it’s mild” are back.
They’re selling “immunity debt.”
We should be skeptical.
Schools
and daycares are sending letters home to parents talking about this
“immunity debt.” They’re saying that healthy children are getting
sicker, even dying, because they weren’t exposed to enough germs over
the last two years. Newspapers and TV stations across the country are
running with it, proposing it as a “possible reason” for this year’s
explosion in pediatric hospitalizations. Meanwhile, major medical
organizations have sent a letter
to President Biden urging him to declare an emergency over an “alarming
surge of pediatric hospitalizations” due to a range of respiratory
viruses, including Covid.
A lot of people are drinking the “immunity debt” kool-aid.
After
all, Americans have believed for generations that getting sick is “good
for you.” We think our immune system behaves like a muscle. We worry
that if we’re not giving it a workout, we’ll get weak.
It’s a myth, just like the law of declining virulence.
