Long COVID is Now the Number One Chronic Illness in Children

Repeatedly mass infecting kids with COVID is not a public health strategy. It's a fast pass to declining population health

A June 10th headline in Newsweek asks the question no one- including the author of the article- is willing to answer directly: Why are so many children getting long COVID?

Of course, it is no mystery why so many children are getting Long COVID. So many children are getting Long COVID because so many children are getting COVID. Over, and over, and over again.

So many children are getting Long COVID because COVID causes Long COVID, and children are not “immune” to COVID, they are not becoming healthier with each infection, and the adults around them are doing nothing to mitigate the virus.

Newsweek’s piece relates the shocking findings of a new RECOVER study: that up to 5.8 million American children now have Long COVID, making it the most common chronic illness affecting children. However, this fact is not treated with any urgency by Newsweek, nor is the current approach to COVID- do literally nothing- questioned as the proper one.

Instead, the article does some equivocating about whether Long COVID has actually surpassed asthma as the most common chronic illness affecting children before accepting that, at the very least, the two are neck-and-neck (a mere five years into COVID’s existence). The article goes on to call for more research and more vaccination- certainly two critical pieces of a functional COVID response.

But, as always, Newsweek ignores prevention as a lost cause, never even touching on the reality that airborne viruses spread more easily in poorly ventilated classrooms, or that high-quality HEPA filtration could help bring down transmission, or that socially normalizing measures like masking and testing would mitigate the onslaught of infections in children. We’ve known for years that new Far-UVC lamps can reduce the level of indoor microbes by 98% in under 5 minutes- yet the public hasn’t even heard of the technology, much less have we discussed introducing it into classrooms.

The RECOVER study lays out a now well-established conceptual model for understanding categories of Long COVID (or PASC) presentations. These categories include exacerbation of underlying conditions (e.g., “persistent cough in children with asthma and chronic lung disease, diabetic ketoacidosis in children with diabetes, exacerbation of mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions”), persistent symptoms of acute infections, and de novo conditions (“including new-onset autoimmune conditions, such as the development of type 1 diabetes”). As the study notes, “These conditions may follow mild or even asymptomatic infection.”

Additionally, children are at risk for MIS-C:

One example of a serious complication after infection that was identified early in the pandemic is multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), which results from a hyperinflammatory response to SARS-CoV-2, observed 2 to 6 weeks after initial infection.

Below, Figure 2 from the RECOVER study, showing organ system involvement of PASC in children.

Figure 2 from RECOVER study Postacute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 in Children

Of course, the RECOVER study is hardly alone in affirming that children are being harmed by endless COVID infections. During the earliest days of the pandemic, political leaders pushed convenient narratives about children being unlikely or even unable to catch or transmit COVID without evidence. Ultimately, schools were reopened without any upgraded air quality measures even before children were vaccinated, while the science showed that children, just like adults, were at risk for myriad post-viral health problems.

As time goes on and studies accrue, those health effects only continue to come into focus.

A recent study focused on characterizing Long COVID in young children, finding that 14% of infants-toddlers and 15% of preschool aged children in the study met the criteria for probable Long COVID. Symptoms to watch out for included poor appetite, trouble sleeping, wet cough, dry cough, stuffy nose and daytime tiredness/low energy.

But these classic Long COVID symptoms are not the only kinds of health problems seen in children.

Already in late 2020, researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania had “found elevated levels of a biomarker related to blood vessel damage in children with SARS-CoV-2 infection, even if the children had minimal or no symptoms of COVID-19.”

A fall 2024 study found that kids with Long COVID have impaired neutrophil function, which correlates to the severity of their condition. Neutrophils are a type of white blood cell that help defend the body from infections.

In April, Nature published a look at Post-acute cardiovascular sequalae of COVID in children and adolescents, accomplished using electronic health records. The study found that:

children and adolescents with prior SARS-CoV-2 infection are at a statistically significant increased risk of various cardiovascular outcomes, including hypertension, ventricular arrhythmias, myocarditis, heart failure, cardiomyopathy, cardiac arrest, thromboembolism, chest pain, and palpitations, compared to uninfected controls.

A study in Taiwan found “Increased post-COVID-19 behavioral, emotional, and social problems”, with the authors reporting:

Compared with the control group, the COVID group in the post-COVID condition had more severe symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity-impulsivity, opposition, a wide range of emotional and behavioral problems, and poor school functions, school attitude, social interaction, school behavioral problems, and interaction problems with their parents. Compared with the pre-COVID condition, the COVID group had greater severity of inattention, somatic complaints, thought problems, internalizing problems, poor school functions, and interaction problems with their parents in the post-COVID condition.

If many of these health effects sound familiar - vascular damage, heart damage, immune system damage, cognitive damage- that’s because children are, after all, human beings. It should have been intuitive that a virus killing adults would not be perfectly safe for children to catch, but economic and political interests were behind the wheel- not kids’ wellbeing- as pundits and influencers raced to proclaim that children would not and could not be hurt by infections.

There’s plenty we still don’t know about what cumulative infections will mean as kids rack up another 5, 10, 15, 20 infections- or about what post-COVID looks like in 5, 10, 15, 20 years. A new study found that, “despite milder clinical respiratory symptoms, children’s metabolic disturbances mirrored those seen in severe adult COVID-19 patients, indicating a shared inflammatory response to SARS-CoV-2,” which the authors note indicates a need for further investigation. But in the meantime, before the implications of altering kids’ metabolic profiles are fully understood, how many more variants will we allow to rip through schools?

Since 2019, school attendance has taken a massive hit and never recovered to pre-pandemic levels, for obvious reasons; kids are sicker. Yet media pundits and politicians adopt an attitude of utter cluelessness as sick days remain high around the world, pushing evidence-free narratives about parents refusing to take schooling seriously, and instituting ever-harsher punishments for absent students. The UK government even ran a misguided campaign to push parents to send their children to school sick, a move that can only result in more sick children and more absences.

PSA poster from UK NHS pushing parents to send kids to school sick

A recent article in the Daily Mail conflated “kids staying home sick” with “skipping school” with this bewildering opening sentence:

Parents are being told to send their children to school with coughs and colds after a poll found one in four adults think it is okay for youngsters to skip school.

The statement is profoundly revelatory; it seems to mix up the propagandist explanation for school absences with reality, ultimately presuming them to be one and the same. Parents are scolded for not sending their kids into class with “coughs and colds” because it’s not okay to “skip school”- at a time when the press is trying to sell the narrative that kids are simply choosing to skip school, not sick.

This “new normal” of absence, illness and chronic disease is a far cry from the placating vision we were sold by minimizers back in 2020, 2021 and 2022. Last week, RFK Jr. staged a coup against the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), firing all 17 members. Among his replacement nominees? Martin Kulldorff, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration who claimed, on May 15, 2022, “75% of American children have already had covid, providing strong natural immunity against future infection.”

Kulldorff, now handpicked by MAHA to help dismantle access to vaccines in the US, was mainstreamed by news outlets across the political spectrum. In fact, he was platformed in September 2020 by none other than… Jacobin. “Children and young adults have minimal risk, and there is no scientific or public health rationale to close day care centers, schools, or colleges…school closures are especially harmful for working-class children,” he stated in the outlet.

His framing conveniently neglected to mention that teachers, and elderly and immunocompromised family members were also being protected by keeping children in remote schooling prior to vaccines. He also failed to mention that it was teachers’ unions demanding school closures as a condition of safe employment, that working-class people are less likely to have access to quality medical care should they become infected, and that it was wealthier parents- not poor parents- who were most willing to send their kids to school in person. But even his central claim - that children have minimal risk from COVID- wasn’t true.

Both the idea that COVID is harmless to kids and the idea that kids had some sort of “strong natural immunity” after their first infection should be debunked by now. It’s obvious that children are being continually reinfected, and that many children are suffering from Long COVID. (As to whether Kulldorff believed that “immunity” to COVID meant protection from infection, I’ll let his own words in Jacobin condemn him: “For nursing homes, the key is to utilize staff with acquired immunity and to frequently test other staff members as well as all visitors.”)

But clearly, the truth does not matter; only keeping kids in school, adults at work, and business-as-usual operating matters, and Kulldorff’s economy-friendly narratives provided a helpful bridge to push people back into their (profitable) routines.

It’s worth noting that at the time Kulldorff and the rest of the GBD crew were proclaiming COVID’s harmlessness to kids, they couldn’t possibly have had enough information to determine the veracity of their own claims. Viruses like the chickenpox, EBV, HIV, HPV, and HSV often present with mild initial infections but may cause major damage years later. We now know COVID can as well.

For so-called experts to run with an assumption that an initially mild-presenting acute infection would be long-term harmless was just that; an assumption. They were willing to gamble the health of a generation of children on a guess in order to go “back to normal” because that’s what the oligarchy clamored for. Because it costs money to shut the world economy down. Because people who mattered were angry. Because children aren’t people who matter.

Over the past five years, Kulldorff and the other authors of the Great Barrington Declaration have won an utter cultural victory over those who sought to protect public health, not least because so few on the left fought to defend disabled and vulnerable people as COVID was normalized. It is now accepted that “lockdowns” were an “overreaction” - despite the fact that The Economist estimated the global excess death toll attributable to COVID at nearly 30 million people as of January 2024.

This is not accepted because anything Kulldorff said was correct; it is accepted because it was repeated so many times, because it is economically and politically convenient for the oligarchy, and because the alternative- that COVID was dangerous- is scary. It’s scary because today, COVID is not gone. We did not, as Kulldorff claimed we would, all develop immunity. Our kids didn’t. They still catch it, in their schools which do not protect them from infections, where air quality has not been upgraded, where snotty kids are encouraged to come to class no matter what.

So if COVID is a virus that can disable them, damages their blood vessels, raises their risk of heart failure and cardiac arrest, causes autoimmune disorders, diabetes, and a range of mental health and cognitive problems, then we’d be doing something really awful by failing to deal with, or even acknowledge it. Maybe even unforgiveable.

For years now, right-wingers have successfully mainstreamed the “you-do-you” approach to public health. The concept was that everyone should simply gauge their own risk level and then expose themselves to as much or as little COVID as they like. In practice, of course, this is absurd; we all share public air. But even to the degree some of us are able to have control over our environments, this approach never accounted for children and babies, who could not possibly consent to being infected with this virus repeatedly from birth.

We now have nearly 6 million children in this country dealing with Long COVID, more than suffer from any other chronic illness, and the virus has been circulating for only half a decade. Do we plan to keep reinfecting these children with the virus that has already harmed them, a dozen more times before they even reach adulthood? Do we plan to disable more kids before they ever get to experience what a healthy body feels like? When we joke about it “not being worth it” to take mitigating measures like masking and testing, do we understand that it’s not just our futures we’re calling worthless?

What if, when kids get sick, we teach them to stay home and rest instead of going into school anyway and infecting others?

What if instead of assuming Long COVID is going to happen to “someone else’s” child, we assumed it might happen to our own, and acted accordingly?

What if instead of listing reasons it’s impossible to confront or deal with this problem, we set about trying to solve it, because we are, after all, the adults in the room?

What if instead of doing absolutely nothing, we did something?