Kids keep getting sicker as evidence for COVID immune damage builds

As the press pushes "immunity debt" past the breaking point of believability, are parents ready to wake up to the illness crisis?

Years ago, in the winter of 2021-2022, parents began repeating an anti-vaxxer claim. “Infections,” they began to say, “build the immune system.”

Winter 2020-2021 had been the year of lockdowns and school closures, but by the next year, kids were sick. As 2022 progressed, the kids remained sick. As winter turned to spring, and summer, back to fall and winter again, the kids couldn’t seem to shake their seasonal and suddenly-not-so-seasonal bugs. RSV became a buzzword. Strep A seemed to be killing more children than usual. And this winter, flu and norovirus surged brutally high as the public was told to watch out for walking pneumonia.

“We’re experiencing an uptick in pneumonia,” went the common parlance. But “uptick” isn’t really the right word to describe it. Central Nova Scotia, for example, reported 753 cases of pneumonia as of October 2024, versus 260 at the same time the previous year. As toddlers were hit hard by the disease, officials scratched their heads. Reporting in Medical Press quoted the CDC as stating, “The increase in children ages 2–4 years is notable because M. pneumoniae historically hasn't been recognized as a leading cause of pneumonia in this age group.”

Through it all, governments and media grasped for any explanation that did not feature the collapse of public health and introduction of a novel virus that harms immune systems.

When surging illness rates first began to attract public concern back in 2022, the press pushed parents hard on the concept of “immunity debt”. The term was first coined in 2021, when a handful of French scientists claimed that the explanation for the high rates of illness had to do with the low rates of illness the previous year.

As explained by Vox:

The authors hypothesized that after several pandemic years during which masks, distancing, and ventilation protected so many people from initial infections with a range of viruses, more people than usual would be catching certain diseases for the first — and worst — time now that those protections are not as strongly in place.

Vox’s article goes on to condemn a popular bastardization of the paper’s claims: that measures like masking “broke” or harmed immune systems in some way. But they stand by the idea that the pool of kids who were susceptible to illness could be larger due to lockdowns the previous winter.

That may have been a feasible hypothesis for an unusually busy illness season in the winter of 2021-2022. It’s a little unclear why that explanation would still hold in the winter of 2022-2023. But it certainly couldn’t explain high illness levels years later, in the winter of 2024-2025.

This season, H1N1 and H3N2 are both circulating at high levels, with the US experiencing the worst flu season in at least 15 years. 57 children have died. Meanwhile, on January 14, CBS reported that the norovirus wave had already hit more than double last year’s peak, with no end in sight.

Meanwhile, student absence data shows a clear attendance crisis, which outlets like the New York Times blame on changing attitudes toward schooling. Their evidence for this? None whatsoever. Mentions of spiking illnesses in their coverage of the student absence crisis? Also none.

Parents are continually urged to keep their eyes out for illnesses on the ever-growing list of “spiking” and “surging” diseases, though the tone of reporting in the media is one of calm reassurance. Urging parents to “watch out” for pneumonia in 2024, CNN reports:

The pneumonia is caused by tiny Mycoplasma pneumoniae bacteria and cases are spiking this year, particularly among preschool-age children, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which sent a bulletin alerting parents and doctors to the uptick last week.

Mycoplasma pneumonia is the latest entry on a growing list of lung infections keeping doctors on their toes this fall. Whooping cough, or pertussis, cases – which also cause a prolonged cough – are five times higher than they were at this time last year, and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, is also rising in parts of the US.

At no point in this article are parents urged to wear masks, investigate the air quality at their local schools, or stay home when ill. It’s unclear, what, exactly, “watching out”, lacking any public health interventions or guidance whatsoever, is supposed to accomplish.

As seasonal illnesses get thrown into the basket with pneumonia, TB cases are also on the rise. Globally, a decade of decline was thrown into reverse as cases increased by 4.6% between 2020 and 2020 and 2023. But stranger still, US TB cases, which have been declining since 1991, also began to climb in 2020, increasing 15% in 2023. Kansas made headlines last month with its outbreak, the largest US outbreak on record.

The data doesn’t lie, and a Bloomberg News analysis showed that:

outbreaks of diseases such as measles, whooping cough, tuberculosis and polio, as well as dengue and cholera are surging worldwide…[the] study has compiled data from over 60 organisations and public health agencies showing that the world is seeing a resurgence of at least 13 infectious diseases, with cases higher than before the pandemic in many regions. Over 40 countries or territories have reported at least one infectious disease resurgence that’s 10-fold or more over their pre-pandemic baseline.

It’s not debatable: people are sicker.

COVID & The Immune System

Meanwhile, scientists have been looking closely at SARS-COV-2’s impacts on the immune system since the very beginning, though you might not know it to read the newspapers. Studies continually find that yes, COVID is impacting the immune system. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as more studies turn up damage after COVID, naysayers continue to move the goalposts, often insisting that dysregulation is “only seen in Long COVID”. But the term Long COVID simply means “people who were long-term damaged by COVID”, so dismissing those with Long COVID is a neat little logical trick.

If your standard for counting those harmed by COVID definitionally excludes “people harmed by COVID”, it is indeed hard to find anybody harmed by COVID! Saying “COVID only harms people with Long COVID” is akin to saying “COVID only harms people that COVID harms”.

Immune dysregulation and autoimmunity are considered to be major factors underlying the pathogenesis of Long COVID. A January 2024 article in Science titled “Immune Damage in Long COVID” states:

Patients with Long Covid display signs of immune dysfunction and exhaustion (1), persistent immune cell activation (3), and autoimmune antibody production (1), which are also pathological features of acute COVID-19.

The article goes on to explain that the complement system, part of your innate immune system, is activated during acute infections and is remaining activated in Long COVID patients. The recent piece Solving the Puzzle of Long COVID also lists immune dysregulation and autoimmunity as a leading hypothesis for the underlying pathogenesis of the condition.

In January 2022, a paper was published in Nature Immunology titled, “Immunological dysfunction persists for 8 months following initial mild-to-moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection.” This paper found that, “Patients with LC had highly activated innate immune cells, lacked naive T and B cells and showed elevated expression of type I IFN (IFN-β) and type III IFN (IFN-λ1) that remained persistently high at 8 months after infection.” Worth noting that 8 months was the end of the study period, not the point at which T and B cells were reconstituted.

Dendritic cell deficiencies following COVID were documented even earlier, in a Cellular & Molecular Immunology paper published in July 2021. “Dendritic cell deficiencies persist seven months after SARS-CoV-2 infection” found that, “Some DC activation markers are not normalized neither in previously hospitalized nor in nonhospitalized patients 7 months after SARS-CoV-2 infection”. And again, seven months was when the study ended, not the damage. Dendritic cells help your innate immune system communicate with your adaptive immune system. The paper goes on to conclude that:

It is unknown whether these defects in the DCs compartment will be reversible after longer follow up or specific therapies may be needed for the normalization of these defects. What is clear is that persisting symptoms and unexpected substantial organ dysfunction are observed in an increasing number of patients who have recovered from COVID-19.

Recently, PolyBio Research Foundation reported being the first to document NK (Natural Killer) Cell dysfunction in Long COVID. Researchers “found that the percentage of cytotoxic natural killer (NK) cells, crucial immune cells responsible for clearing virus-infected cells, was notably reduced in people with long COVID compared to those who had fully recovered from COVID-19.”

Some studies have looked specifically at whether COVID infections can leave children more vulnerable to other illnesses, and found that yes, they can. For example, this 2023 study titled, “Association of COVID-19 with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infections in children aged 0–5 years in the USA in 2022: a multicentre retrospective cohort study.” The study found that:

COVID-19 was associated with a significantly increased risk for RSV infections among children aged 0–5 years in 2022. Similar findings were replicated for a study population of children aged 0–5 years in 2021. Our findings suggest that COVID-19 contributed to the 2022 surge of RSV cases in young children through the large buildup of COVID-19-infected children and the potential long-term adverse effects of COVID-19 on the immune and respiratory system.

Emphasis mine. At a time when parents are desperate for answers about their children’s illnesses, and the same winter during which press continued to print falsehoods about public health measures harming children’s ability to fight viruses, this paper provided real answers. But since those answer’s didn’t fit neatly with the political narrative being pushed- we’re back to normal, and no one should be preventing COVID infections- it and its conclusions were buried and ignored.

In summary, harm has been documented to T cells, B cells, dendritic cells, NK cells, and the complement system, and studies consistently find immune dysregulation to be a key feature of Long COVID.

Long COVID is not a rare outcome of COVID, and one of the real threats we face with the SARS-COV-2 Forever-Reinfection strategy is the sheer volume of infections. Immunity to these infections lasts a matter of months, not years, and new variants evolve rapidly. We’re facing an unsustainable rate of reinfection for an unsustainable percentage of the population with a virus that carries an unsustainably high risk of long-term damage.

Even if certain types of immune damage following COVID did turn out to be transient, which is another line of argument taken up by minimizers, how would we know in a world plagued by never-ending reinfections? If damage lasts 7 or 8 months, and a child is reinfected with the KP.2 variant in the summer and the XEC variant in the winter, when is that child ever healthy? This type of debate becomes academic in a world without mitigations; the body would barely have time to recover from one infection before the next would be on deck.

It is true that not everyone is likely to experience the same amount of immune damage after COVID, just like not everyone will experience the same amount of heart damage, liver damage or kidney damage. That doesn’t mean heart damage doesn’t occur after COVID. Nor does it mean we can exclude the entire population of people who suffer heart damage after COVID when we discuss whether COVID damages the heart.

If we were to see immune damage manifesting at a population level, it would look like what we’re seeing today: big waves of common illnesses. Unusual spikes of uncommon illnesses. Course reversal for previously declining and eliminated illnesses. An unexplained, global wave of sickness.

It’s worth asking, as we exit the fourth winter since lockdowns: how many more winters will go by before parents ask questions? How many years will pass before “immunity debt” slides off the tongue a little less easily? How many children must die of flu, strep A and pneumonia before the public demands action? Because we live in an era with technological solutions at our fingertips, yet apparently no will- as of yet- to pursue them.

How much more denial can the bodies of our children take? Are we going to force them to find out?