LONG Covid versus SHORT-sightedness

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.28.25324858v1.full.pdf

“Since reinfection further increases the likelihood of PASC, ensuring children receive vaccines can be a key strategy in mitigating long-term health consequences. However, with the milder symptoms associated with Omicron variants and delayed availability of vaccine for children less than 5 years old, vaccination rates in children have been stagnant. Older children have not received booster doses with more recent versions of vaccine and very few younger children have received any doses of vaccine. These findings support the idea of a general “COVID fatigue” that is prevalent among the public that does not perceive COVID-19 as an ongoing threat that requires them to seek additional immunity. At the same time, the public has ongoing frustration about the lack of treatment options for PASC. With prior studies demonstrating that vaccination reduces the risk of PASC and with an increased risk of PASC with each infection, these findings could help motivate more families to seek vaccination.”

Geert: This is yet another example of how short-sightedness and silo thinking among scientists harm public health. In 2021, there was widespread panic over MISC (Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children) when the more infectious and more virulent Delta variant occasionally broke through the otherwise strong innate immunity of young children. At the time, I already pointed out that this syndrome was not due to an intrinsic weakness of the innate immune system in young children but rather to the virus’s rapid evolution toward a higher degree of infection and virulence as a result of the collective pressure on viral infectiousness exerted by human populations that were massively subjected to stringent infection-prevention measures. Moreover, I am not aware of any child who died from MISC, and by now, it is no longer even discussed.

The same applies to PASC, which, according to this publication, supposedly causes a form of long Covid, despite no research having been conducted on the persistence of PASC symptoms in children. The description of possible damage to various organs actually points more toward a kind of MISC caused by re-infection. But even this symptomatology is now no longer mentioned in the context of re-infection of children, and as far as I know, not a single child has ever died from it. The study results in the referenced publication cover the period from early 2022 to October 2023 and were typically triggered by an Omicron reinfection after a prior Omicron infection. Although Omicron infections were often characterized by a milder course, reinfections regularly occurred in individuals that were still in the process of maturing their antibodies (Abs) from the previous infection into fully functional/ neutralizing Abs. This can be explained by Omicron’s high infection rate, which led to a portion of the population becoming reinfected relatively quickly after an initial infection. It is widely known and documented that Abs with low/ insufficient neutralizing capacity can enhance the infectivity of the virus (known as ‘Ab-dependent enhancement of infection’), thereby contributing to the severity of reinfections. By now, this problem has also resolved itself—not because the circulating Omicron descendants have become less infectious, but because inter-host transmission has become more difficult due to significantly reduced viral shedding. Reduced viral shedding lowers the viral load of reinfections enough for young children’s innate immune systems to eliminate the virus in a timely and effective manner. Slightly older children no longer experience any issues anyway, as their innate immune systems have by now been trained through repeated exposure to the virus.
It’s frustrating to find that scientists and health authorities keep recycling results from earlier phases of the pandemic—periods during which young children’s immune systems were indeed under pressure, albeit never in a way that was alarming or associated with mortality. That phase was, above all, temporary, but this seems particularly difficult to grasp for those who still fail to understand that the virus and the immune system are constantly adapting to each other. However, the immune system is unable to control viral replication and transmission because herd immunity does not exist. I am repeating myself once again by emphasizing that this lack of herd immunity is the result of the reckless mass Covid-19 vaccination campaign, which, during a pandemic, only made the virus increasingly infectious and more capable of evading immune system attacks. In other words, suboptimal immune pressure has led to immune escape and gain-of-function of SARS-CoV-2.

Overall conclusion: The cause of MISC, whether after an initial infection or upon reinfection (so-called PASC), should therefore not be attributed to weaknesses in the child's immune system but rather to the reckless, ill-conceived mass vaccination campaign conducted in the midst of a pandemic.