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Remember Swine Flu? That Was More Deadly to Kids Than COVID

AP Photo/Marta Lavandier

Last month, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued a mandate that eligible K-12 students in his state must be vaccinated for COVID-19 to attend public or private school starting in the fall of 2022. The CDC still recommends students wear masks in schools. San Francisco recently expanded its indoor proof-of-vaccination mandate to include kids ages 5 to 11, and Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to follow suit in New York City.

I honestly can’t say whether these people who are enforcing these ideas think they’re doing good or if they’re just power-hungry.

COVID may be a serious disease, but there’s enough data available to show even the most diehard COVID zealot that kids don’t even need to be masked, let alone vaccinated.

Yet, sadly, that data is ignored.

For example, a CDC study showed no difference in infection rates between schools with and without mask mandates.

So why have our kids worn masks? They don’t appear to protect kids from COVID, but kids are then exposed to an alarming number of other dangerous pathogens that collect on those masks.

Overall, school-aged children have a COVID recovery rate of 99.997%—better than their mortality risk from the seasonal flu. This one fact alone should make it clear to everyone that our kids are generally safe. As long as they don’t have any pre-existing conditions that make them more likely to have severe problems with COVID, their risk is minimal.

In fact, when it comes to COVID, age has more impact on one’s risk of dying than vaccination. According to a recent study from the UK, unvaccinated children are safer from COVID than even vaccinated adults of any age.

COVID-19 isn’t nearly as deadly to children as other past viruses that didn’t prompt power-hungry Democrats to impose mandates on kids to keep them out of public places.

“Swine flu, for example, resulted in roughly 19.5 million infections in children between the ages of 0-17 from April 2009-2010, causing 1,282 deaths,” notes the Foundation for Economic Education. “This means it had an infection fatality rate of 0.0066 percent.”

What about COVID, you ask? “COVID-19, on the other hand, resulted in nearly 27 million infections in children between February 2020 and May 2021, causing 332 deaths. This means COVID had an infection fatality ratio of 0.0012 percent.”

This means that the swine flu’s fatality rate for children was more than five times higher than COVID-19. “Put another way, the 1,282 lives swine flu claimed in that single year is nearly double the 645 COVID deaths among U.S. children during the entire pandemic.”

Related: Pfizer Files for Emergency Use Authorization of New COVID Pill

It’s amazing what a little perspective can do.

“A recent peer-reviewed study in Britain of nearly 260,000 children [1,700 of whom showed symptoms] reminds us that for most kids, a coronavirus infection will manifest as the common cold—if anything,” Lucy McBride, a practicing internist in Washington, D.C., recently wrote in The Atlantic.

So, why do Democrats think we need to mandate vaccinations for children? Such mandates punish unvaccinated children because their parents are familiar with the data that says it is medically unnecessary to vaccinate their kids from COVID.

We didn’t shut down the economy or lock up our kids and force them to wear masks for the swine flu, or even the seasonal flu, which proves our government’s reaction to COVID was excessive. It always was. We shouldn’t be mandating vaccines for kids or adults. We shouldn’t require masks. Heck, Dr. Fauci admitted they don’t work anyway. It’s time to get back to the way things were.

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