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The Smoke Alarm Fallacy

The fact that we did a decent job of protecting children at the start of the pandemic was used to claim that children didn’t need protection at all. That’s farcical.

Jonathan Howard onMarch 10, 2023

In a recent article for Peste Magazine, I described the origin of a zombie myth spread by contrarian doctors, namely that COVID only kills one a in million children. In reality, this reflected the odds of an elementary school child dying only during the pandemic’s first 7 months. As new variants arrived and protections vanished, more children inevitably died. According to the Coronavirus in Kids (COVKID) Tracking and Education Project, the actual pediatric death rate as of September 2022 ranged from a low of 7.2 per million for 4-year olds to a peak of 91.8 per million for infants. Of course, often the numerator matters more than the denominator. Over 700 children under age 4 years have died of COVID in the US. That’s horrible. Many thousands more were injured by the virus, though grave outcomes in children are very rare outcome fortunately.

However, beyond the fact that this “one a in million” number is both blatantly and tragically false, doctors predictably used it in an inappropriate way to minimize COVID’s impact on children. The fact that we did a decent job of protecting children at the start of the pandemic was used as evidence that children didn’t need protection at all, not even a vaccine.  Doctors who claimed that children didn’t need to be vaccinated against COVID because more children died of some other cause, failed to grasp that our reactively successful efforts to project children in the spring of 2020 was the only reason they could make these ludicrous comparisons.

I’m calling this absurd line of thinking the smoke alarm fallacy after a classic line from The Simpsons, and I’ve been seeing it everywhere lately.

Read the rest here:

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-smoke-detector-fallacy/

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