GoodOwl
The 1 Hoo Knocks
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RE: Rice Omicron Update
Colleges maintain strict vaccine mandates despite reports of unexpected heart risks in young adults
Medical professor demands colleges show the science behind "martial law" for student populations already required to be vaccinated.
Quote:Growing evidence of an unexpectedly high incidence of heart inflammation in young adults following two-dose mRNA vaccination is also shining a light on vaccination requirements imposed by colleges.
"Students are the lowest risk population on planet Earth," and yet colleges are "imposing a kind of martial law" on them, Johns Hopkins University medical professor Marty Makary wrote in a scathing essay Tuesday about COVID "dogma" in higher education, particularly elite schools.
"Over the last six months, the risk of a person in the broader age group (15-24) dying of Covid or dying with Covid … was 0.001%," and all or nearly all were "unvaccinated people with a medical comorbidity," said Makary, a member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Universities' Covid Policies Defy Science and Reason
by:
Marty Makary M.D., M.P.H., Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
Quote:Parents and students should challenge university dogma with data.
Universities are supposed to be bastions of critical thinking, reason and logic. But the Covid policies they have adopted—policies that have derailed two years of students’ education and threaten to upend the upcoming spring semester—have exposed them as nonsensical, anti-scientific and often downright cruel....
Students are the lowest risk population on planet Earth. Over the last six months, the risk of a person in the broader age group (15-24) dying of Covid or dying with Covid (the CDC does not clearly distinguish), was 0.001%. All or nearly all of those deaths were in a very specific subgroup: unvaccinated people with a medical comorbidity. But despite Georgetown’s strict vaccination, masking, testing, and quarantine requirements, the university announced late last month that “all University events, including meetings with visitors, will need to be held virtually or outdoors,” among many other restrictions....
At these institutions of higher learning and thousands more, science is supposedly held in the highest esteem. So where is the scientific support for masking outdoors? Where is the scientific support for constantly testing fully vaccinated young people? Where is the support for the confinement of asymptomatic, young people who test positive for a virus to which they are already immune on a campus of other immune people?
The data simply do not justify any of it.
According to the CDC, the risk of a fully vaccinated adult ending up in the hospital for Covid was 1 in 26,000 for the week ending in November 27. Who was that one person? Not a college student. One analysis of breakthrough infections by age found that the average age of a vaccinated person being hospitalized is 72 years, and the average age of a vaccinated person dying of Covid is 80. The data clearly tell us that the risk of a breakthrough Covid infection resulting in severe illness is extremely rare. When it does occur, it is profoundly skewed toward septuagenarians and octogenarians....
From the beginning of this pandemic, the risk of Covid to young people has always been extremely low, a finding public health officials have downplayed instead of acknowledged. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, children have represented 0.00%-0.27% of all Covid-19 deaths.
In other words, a total of 803 American children have died from Covid or with Covid over the last two years. That’s less than the number of total deaths from both influenza and RSV infection in a typical year before the pandemic. A recent study of children in Germany found that no healthy child between the ages of 5 and 17 died of Covid during a 15-month period when nearly all were unvaccinated. Zero. In the whole country.
And yet there is very much a public health crisis facing young people. It is a crisis that’s been created by these draconian Covid policies—a crisis that’s the result of depriving young Americans of the basic enjoyment of life and the benefits of human connection....
Last week, the CDC reported that weekly deaths in people age 18-29 has decreased to zero from one in five million the week prior. That’s lower than the number of deaths from car accidents, suicide, and firearms in young people. So why are we imposing a kind of martial law on students to ever so slightly reduce the chance that they develop a mild illness?
Current data actually tips the risk to benefit analysis in favor of not boosting young healthy people. Of course, that data could change in the future, at which time we may need to shift our strategy. But at the moment it is not compelling. A recent Israeli study in the New England Journal of Medicine noted zero Covid deaths among double-vaccinated people 16-29 years old without a booster. You can’t lower a risk of zero any further with a booster. But the risk of myocarditis in young people is quite real. A new study published last week by Kaiser Permanente Northwest researchers found that as many as 1 in 1,860 men 18-24 years old developed myocarditis after the second shot. In another New England Journal of Medicine study of 136 people who developed myocarditis, two cases were critical and one 22-year old died.
Schools like Emory, Tulane, Wake Forest and Johns Hopkins, my own university, which are now requiring boosters in healthy young people are venturing into uncharted waters. They are risking health complications in young people for the sake of beating back mild and asymptomatic infections.
Students, parents and university donors should voice their concerns. They should ask good questions, such as: New data last week from the U.K. found that booster efficacy at 10 weeks dropped to 35% with Pfizer and 45% with Moderna, will the university require another booster at that time? And will boosters be required every 3-6 months in perpetuity? How many healthy college students have died from Covid during the pandemic? Will we continue to take all these precautions next year if influenza poses the same case fatality rate? If I have circulating antibodies from prior Covid illness, will the university recognize those antibodies as countries in Europe do? Does the university or CDC have any updated data on mental health problems among students each year over the last three years?
The medical establishment is intoxicated with groupthink, just as it had in believing that Covid spreads through surface transmission, in instituting barbaric policies that prohibited people from visiting their dying loved ones, and in shutting children out of school for a less contagious variant last year. Concerned citizens should challenge medical dogma with data....
It’s time to learn to live with Covid by using some common sense practices: If you’re sick, stay home. If you’re around someone vulnerable, be careful. If you’ve been exposed, wear a real, quality, N95 mask. For the young who have natural or vaccinated immunity, it’s a mild virus that will circulate for the rest of their lives.
I worked at Georgetown hospital for five years as a resident. One crucial lesson my mentors there hammered into me was: Treat the person, not the lab result. When students return to campus later this month—as I hope they will to alleviate a worsening mental health crisis—college administrators need to heed this essential advice.
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