10 ms·

Likely cause of mystery child hepatitis outbreak found

100 points by iamben 4y ago

iamben 4y ago
The Glasgow University post: https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_863600_en.html https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_863600_en.html
- downwithbgp 4y ago
  Scottish study (Adeno-associated virus 2 infection in children with non-A-E hepatitis): https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.19.22277425 https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.19.22277425 I was unable to find the UCL (London) study, but the above DOI references UCL faculty.
  - Vecr 4y ago
    I wonder why they singled out A and E, shouldn't it be non-A, non-B, non-C, non-Delta, non-E hepatitis. It's been a long time since you could call hepatitis C "non-A, non-B hepatitis". Though this is in children, they probably should not be getting hepatitis C unless something has gone horribly wrong, so it might be okay to exclude that one, and hepatitis Delta is obscure, though is does show an analogue with this because the coinfecting "helper" with Delta is hepatitis B virus.
    - tremon 4y ago
      IIRC from the previous discussions, liver complications are more common following Hep-A or Hep-E infections. What was new about this wave of cases was liver complications without the known Hep A/E precursor.
jagged-chisel 4y ago
> The two teams of researchers, from London and Glasgow, say infants exposed later than normal - because of Covid restrictions - missed out on some early immunity to: > - adenovirus, which normally causes colds and stomach upsets > - adeno-associated virus two, which normally causes no illness and requires a coinfecting "helper" virus - such as adenovirus - to replicate > That could explain why some developed the unusual and worrying liver complications.
- sofixa 4y ago
  At face value, it sounds doubtful. The kid in the article is 3 now, so we can assume he was 1 when the pandemic started. In former communist countries in Eastern Europe, maternity leave up to 3 years is not uncommon now, and was much less uncommon before the fall of the respective regime. Of course kids would be taken out and play with others at playgrounds even if there's no kindergarten and the mother takes care of the kid for 3 years, so it's not total isolation. But the pandemic hasn't resulted in total isolation either, there were schools/kindergartens that opened at least for some periods of time, playgrounds too (past the initial lockdowns which were pretty much full panic mode). Those kids didn't spend 2 years locked at home. So what's the difference? The masks? Did kids under 3 even wear masks?
  - pjc50 4y ago
    Some of the kids would have been totally isolated, especially if they or a parent are otherwise classed as "clinically vulnerable". Or just very determined not to risk COVID.
  - junofan 4y ago
    Sounds like the difference may be circulating adenovirus and AAV-2.
  - INTPenis 4y ago
    - drcongo 4y ago
      Parent had quite clearly read the article, but I suspect you hadn't read all of their post before replying with whatever this is.
  - h2odragon 4y ago
    I have doubts, too. There's lots of rural kids who didn't have much contact with others in infancy, pre-pandemic. Wouldn't this have shown up in them? Wouldn't it be part of the constant "advice for new parents" flood?
sylware 4y ago
I don't understand why a slightly delayed exposure to some "common" viruses can almost destroy the liver of young children.
- canadiantim 4y ago
  It’s similar to chickenpox in that it’s much safer to be exposed younger, but in this case it’s more pronounced
  - SEJeff 4y ago
    Most kids nowadays (hopefully) get the chickenpox vaccine and never have to suffer from it or shingles as adults.
    - m_t 4y ago
      Not in the UK, where the chickenpox vaccine isn't part of the vaccines given by the NHS.
      - hammock 4y ago
        Wow. I did not peg the NHS as an anti-vax organization
        Vecr 4y ago
        Not anti-vax, they don't want to spend money on something like that. There's a reason the USA spends lots of money on healthcare and the UK does not (though it's obviously relative on a country scale). It's not through magic, it's through spending less money. Spending less money in a healthcare system demands sacrifices, some quite severe.
        cjrp 4y ago
        They have a detailed explanation here https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vaccinations/chickenpox-vaccine-questions-answers/ https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vaccinations/chickenpox-vaccin...
aaron695 4y ago
sudden_dystopia 4y ago
The path to hell is paved with good intentions.
- hgazx 4y ago
  I fail to see the good intentions behind not letting you go outside.
bediger4000 4y ago
> Scientists have ruled out any connection with coronavirus or Covid vaccines. Well, that's a relief.
- upupandup 4y ago
  I just don't buy this. Adenovirus positivity has not increased post-pandemic- and increases in infection are very likely due to increase in testing https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FYg0p7JXoAEg7bw?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FYg0p7JXoAEg7bw?format=jpg&name=... Somebody explain that chart please?
- lnyan 4y ago
  A retrospective case-series study from Israel: Long COVID-19 Liver Manifestation in Children https://journals.lww.com/jpgn/Abstract/9900/Long_COVID_19_Liver_Manifestation_in_Children.84.aspx https://journals.lww.com/jpgn/Abstract/9900/Long_COVID_19_Li...
- isp 4y ago
  The scientists say this in the original paper [0]: > we cannot fully exclude a post-COVID-19 immune-mediated phenomenon in susceptible children So explicitly not "ruled out". [0] https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.19.22277425 https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.19.22277425 - see PDF page 14
ed25519FUUU 4y ago
The cause seems to be social distancing preventing necessary exposure to two types of adenovirus. Sounds like another 2nd-order effect from lockdowns that has been disproportionately harder on children than adults. Really glad I moved out of my “pro lockdown” state.
- bearjaws 4y ago
  ~1000 children have this so far, and many have not required a transplant. How many children lost a caregiver due to covid? 140,000. Thousands have lost both parents and are now orphaned. Not to mention the children who have also died of covid.
  - procrastitron 4y ago
    Indeed, ~1000 worldwide had any sort of hepatitis at all, whereas over 400 have died from Covid in the U.S. alone. Even if their theory is right about isolation being the cause of the hepatitis cases, then it was still the right thing to do in terms of risk vs. reward.
- dfbsdfbwe2ef2e 4y ago
  > Really glad I moved out of my “pro lockdown” state. I haven't. This issue affected 1000 thousand people in 35 countries. Did anyone die from this? Covid on the other hand has killed 6 MILLION. Covid could've been solved in 1 month if everyone would just stay home for 1 month. Unfortunately, because of people like you spread noise, we're still stuck with this for the foreseeable future. In addition, let me just comment how mathematically stupid it is to take the 1st order effects just because you're worried about the 2nd order effects.
  - shannongreen 4y ago
    > Covid could've been solved in 1 month if everyone would just stay home for 1 month. No, it couldn't. And even if it could've, that would be impossible. Believe it or not, places outside the US did do a 'real lockdown' for a lot longer than a month, and it didn't 'solve' covid.
BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
This is going to terrify people just like stories about infant mortality from COVID terrified people. But the article is talking about infections of 1,000 children across 35 countries. These stories shooting to the front page over and over is giving a distorted view of reality that didn’t exist before social media.
- isolli 4y ago
  You are right, but widely disseminating these findings is important in order to counter two equally damaging narratives: that acute hepatitis was caused by vaccines, and that it was caused by Covid. In the end, the authors speculate that lockdowns may have been the ultimate cause.
- DoingIsLearning 4y ago
  > talking about infections of 1,000 children across 35 countries. Just to be accurate these are 1000 _reported_ cases, which are likely very _severe_ cases. I have toddler age kids and I am not interely sure I would be able to distinguish this from another high fever infection. Icteric skin is as far as I know not that noticieable in these cases. So, from a parents perspective, other than slightly whiter poop, without a physician and/or lab work, it would probably just look like one of the other thousands of diseases kids catch in daycare.
yonaguska 4y ago
Scientists and doctors that warned about the health costs of lockdowns on children were cancelled. We really need to set up a Ministry of Ministry of Truth. /s On a serious note, can we ask how we got here? Why were lockdowns so unquestionably pushed? > No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them. However hard it had been to get the fifteen-day shutdown approved, getting another one would be more difficult by many orders of magnitude. Dr Birx from her book. But she's far from the only one to blame.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  1000 kids across 35 countries, versus the thousands dying every day in some single countries at the time. Warning is one thing, being needlessly contrarian while conveniently not having to make a decision yourself is another.
- bandyaboot 4y ago
  > Scientists and doctors that warned about the health costs of lockdowns on children were cancelled. Can you cite a few examples?
  - ghastmaster 4y ago
    https://gbdeclaration.org/ https://gbdeclaration.org/ The Great Barrington Declaration specifically mentioned physical health of children. It did not specify this particular type of situation though. However, in this article the main author of the declaration did specify: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/27/lockdown-social-distancing-could-make-immune-system-weaker-says/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/27/lockdown-social-... Here are the "cancelled" articles: https://reclaimthenet.org/facebook-deletes-epidemiologists-behind-the-great-barrington-declaration/ https://reclaimthenet.org/facebook-deletes-epidemiologists-b... https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/10/13/big-tech-censors-the-great-barrington-declaration/ https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/10/13/big-tech-censors...
jl6 4y ago
I hope that the legacy of covid lockdowns is a renewed appreciation for the second-order, systemic, and unintended consequences of any action, to be weighed against the direct and intended effects.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  And that the number of cases of people with repeat infections and long covid is considered in assessing whether these lockdowns and restrictions should have been lifted and the disease allowed to spread freely.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - malloci 4y ago
    You would need to counter-balance this with the likely models of death and long covid if lockdowns _hadn’t_ occurred as well. You cannot look at the actual stats without taking those mitigating factors into account.
  - EricE 4y ago
    You aren't going to shelter in place a highly contagious airborne virus. Life is not risk free and it's beyond obvious that lockdowns did FAR more harm than good.
- roflc0ptic 4y ago
  I find myself despairing that almost no lessons were learned, no clear institutional improvements came from these systems. The response to monkey pox is bearing that out. A subset of the left (my team) saying “asking gay men to stop having orgies is homophobic”, totally isomorphic to “being worried about COVID is racist against Chinese people”, one of the initial lines. Then you have the total failure to mobilize an institutional response for contact tracing. There’s not apparently any infrastructure for it, despite how monumentally useful such a thing could have been, would be now. I don’t want another endemic smallpox-related virus, and this virus having lots of hosts to evolve in has some clear second order risks. Likewise, the hostility towards masking is owing to some substantive inability to evaluate second order risks. The initial lockdowns, I think, hold up pretty well in retrospect. Closing schools never really made sense for the children once it was identified that the virus attaches via ACE2 receptors; keeping the schools open was a lot less clearcut for the teachers. You don’t become a schoolteacher because of your high appetite for risk.
amluto 4y ago
I think this is the actual paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.19.22277425v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.19.22277425v... And be careful before attributing this to COVID lockdowns. In the US, at least, there does not actually appear to have been any meaningful increase in hepatitis in young children: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7124e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7124e1.htm The UK could be different for any number of reasons, but, at least in the actual paper and in the US, this does not appear to be COVID-related, even indirectly.
- upupandup 4y ago
  I'm just concerned that we are not having the debates we used to. They've already coined the term "immunity debt" and Twitter accounts belonging to researchers who are raising alarms about jumping to early conclusions attributing this to lockdowns are curiously enough being brigaded. I'm not saying one thing or the other, I just want to get a nuanced view that is backed by data but hard to do that when those links are getting removed from the platform. I'm just puzzled as to why this is happening
  - prometheus76 4y ago
    The data itself is a mess. There are no consistent reporting standards or definitions between countries, or even between states.
CodeWriter23 4y ago
I had no idea the adenovirus vaccine provided immunity to hepatitis.
- AstralStorm 4y ago
  It does, to adenovirus caused hepatitis and heptitis B or D coincident with adenovirus infection. The adenovirus infection ruins immune response to certain types of hepatitis viruses.
dfbsdfbwe2ef2e 4y ago
Isn't the _actual_ problem here the fact that these kids weren't vaccinated against hepatitis?
- recyclelater 4y ago
  No because this wasn’t caused by hepatitis virus, but an adenovirus.
  - dfbsdfbwe2ef2e 4y ago
    Why weren't they vaccinated against that then?
    - willmadden 4y ago
      There aren't vaccinations against the common cold. A better question is, were their immune systems dysregulated from COVID/COVID vaccination allowing these adenoviruses to cause hepatitis? The paper did NOT investigate this possibility, and the claim that they proved that the two were unrelated is written in weasel speak. What they showed was that COVID and vaccination did not DIRECTLY cause the hepatitis. The elephant in the room is whether COVID and COVID vaccination dysregulated the kids' immune systems, allowing the adenoviruses to flourish and cause the hepatitis. The number of commenters who read the headline and believed everything without reading the study critically is... disappointing.
      - dfbsdfbwe2ef2e 4y ago
        The number of commenters that miss the difference in scale is disappointing. This affected 1000 people in 35 countries. Covid has killed 6 million people so far.
        willmadden 4y ago
        >Covid has killed 6 million people so far. Based on what definition? The CDC admitted that 94% of the deaths attributed to COVID in the United States were deaths with COVID. The average age of death was the same as the average life expectancy in the US. The average COVID "death" had over two (2) serious comorbidities. I question your number.
willmadden 4y ago
That's a junk article based on a garbage paper making wild speculative claims that lockdowns prevented kids from exposure to cold viruses, somehow resulting in colds giving kids hepatitis. If you read the full text of the paper here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.19.22277425v1.full https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.19.22277425v... you'll see their sample size was insufficient and cherry picked. They only looked at nine (9) cases and fifty eight (58) control subjects. Furthermore, they don't specify their sampling criteria, but they do mention they did NOT include children that were vaccinated in the study. Why? What we do know is that there is emerging evidence that both COVID and COVID vaccination dysregulate the immune system, allowing diseases (like shingles) that are normally suppressed by the immune system until later in life to suddenly appear in young people. Scotland started their child vaccination program in January 2022, around three (3) months in advance of the "worldwide hepatitis outbreak": https://web.archive.org/web/20220124104228/https://www.nhsinform.scot/covid-19-vaccine/the-vaccines/vaccinating-children-aged-5-to-11-years/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220124104228/https://www.nhsin... They need to redo the research, but use a much larger RANDOM sampling of all children who came down with hepatitis, and look for correlations with both COVID infection and COVID vaccination against hepatitis infection. My educated guess is that it had little to do with lockdowns, and much more to do with immune system dysregulation from both COVID and COVID vaccination.
woliveirajr 4y ago
Remembers me about Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL): > Epidemiologic studies indicate that infections in early childhood may protect against pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL)... our results support Greaves’ hypothesis that delayed exposure to infections in early childhood increases risk of ALL. [1] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4100471/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4100471/
- MuchoMaas 4y ago
  After these pediatric hepatitis cases popped up, there was a vocal contingent of MDs and Zero COVID types on Twitter arguing that it showed the urgent necessity to do whatever it takes to protect children from SARS-CoV-2 infections. It's sad to think that this fearmongering is probably causing a lot of children not to get the pathogen exposure they need in early childhood.
trention 4y ago
This is a hypothesis based on a sample size of 9 and already in the comments people are treating it like gospel while pushing their political agendas. Humanity is really (mostly) unfit to deal with both nuanced information and collective action problems.
- Pyramus 4y ago
  You make a valid, and ultimately depressing point. I see lots of commentators arguing about 'lockdowns', but very little discussion what actually constitutes 'lockdowns'. Lockdowns in China looked very different to lockdowns in Europa or lockdowns in the US. Lockdowns in 2020, in most countries, were very different to lockdowns in 2022. > Humanity is really (mostly) unfit to deal with both nuanced information and collective action problems. There is a point to be made that the number of collective action problems has increased, relative to one or two generations ago, and will further increase.
  - MuchoMaas 4y ago
    > I see lots of commentators arguing about 'lockdowns', but very little discussion what actually constitutes 'lockdowns'. Lockdowns in China looked very different to lockdowns in Europa or lockdowns in the US. Lockdowns in 2020, in most countries, were very different to lockdowns in 2022. I'm not sure why I'm supposed to care about this distinction when they've all proven to be completely ineffective can-kicking at best, enormously costly interventions whose scope was extended well beyond their initial "15 days to slow the spread" mandate for precious little (if any) benefit and an accumulating roster of harms.
    - kcplate 4y ago
      You are supposed to care because effect of policies no longer matters, only the intentions. Pragmatism is apparently a forbidden concept in 2022.
    - trention 4y ago
      >can-kicking at best Covid deaths per 100k population USA 311.7 New Zealand 40.27 Source: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality This is what happens when you "can-kick" infections after vaccination (actually, not even after vaccination but after offering vaccines to the population - and a lot of them stupidly refusing them). As I said: >Humanity is really (mostly) unfit to deal with ... nuanced information
TheBlight 4y ago
This feels like half of the answer.
nikolay 4y ago
Nothing new under the sun - the Hygiene Hypothesis [0] at play! [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis
nikolay 4y ago
Should this be categorized as Hepatitis D and require an adenovirus vaccine then?

100 points by iamben 4y ago

The Glasgow University post: https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_863600_en.html https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_863600_en.html

downwithbgp 4y ago
Scottish study (Adeno-associated virus 2 infection in children with non-A-E hepatitis): https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.19.22277425 https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.19.22277425 I was unable to find the UCL (London) study, but the above DOI references UCL faculty.
- Vecr 4y ago
  I wonder why they singled out A and E, shouldn't it be non-A, non-B, non-C, non-Delta, non-E hepatitis. It's been a long time since you could call hepatitis C "non-A, non-B hepatitis". Though this is in children, they probably should not be getting hepatitis C unless something has gone horribly wrong, so it might be okay to exclude that one, and hepatitis Delta is obscure, though is does show an analogue with this because the coinfecting "helper" with Delta is hepatitis B virus.
  - tremon 4y ago
    IIRC from the previous discussions, liver complications are more common following Hep-A or Hep-E infections. What was new about this wave of cases was liver complications without the known Hep A/E precursor.

jagged-chisel 4y ago

> The two teams of researchers, from London and Glasgow, say infants exposed later than normal - because of Covid restrictions - missed out on some early immunity to: > - adenovirus, which normally causes colds and stomach upsets > - adeno-associated virus two, which normally causes no illness and requires a coinfecting "helper" virus - such as adenovirus - to replicate > That could explain why some developed the unusual and worrying liver complications.

sofixa 4y ago
At face value, it sounds doubtful. The kid in the article is 3 now, so we can assume he was 1 when the pandemic started. In former communist countries in Eastern Europe, maternity leave up to 3 years is not uncommon now, and was much less uncommon before the fall of the respective regime. Of course kids would be taken out and play with others at playgrounds even if there's no kindergarten and the mother takes care of the kid for 3 years, so it's not total isolation. But the pandemic hasn't resulted in total isolation either, there were schools/kindergartens that opened at least for some periods of time, playgrounds too (past the initial lockdowns which were pretty much full panic mode). Those kids didn't spend 2 years locked at home. So what's the difference? The masks? Did kids under 3 even wear masks?
- pjc50 4y ago
  Some of the kids would have been totally isolated, especially if they or a parent are otherwise classed as "clinically vulnerable". Or just very determined not to risk COVID.
- junofan 4y ago
  Sounds like the difference may be circulating adenovirus and AAV-2.
- INTPenis 4y ago
  - drcongo 4y ago
    Parent had quite clearly read the article, but I suspect you hadn't read all of their post before replying with whatever this is.
- h2odragon 4y ago
  I have doubts, too. There's lots of rural kids who didn't have much contact with others in infancy, pre-pandemic. Wouldn't this have shown up in them? Wouldn't it be part of the constant "advice for new parents" flood?

sylware 4y ago

I don't understand why a slightly delayed exposure to some "common" viruses can almost destroy the liver of young children.

canadiantim 4y ago
It’s similar to chickenpox in that it’s much safer to be exposed younger, but in this case it’s more pronounced
- SEJeff 4y ago
  Most kids nowadays (hopefully) get the chickenpox vaccine and never have to suffer from it or shingles as adults.
  - m_t 4y ago
    Not in the UK, where the chickenpox vaccine isn't part of the vaccines given by the NHS.
    - hammock 4y ago
      Wow. I did not peg the NHS as an anti-vax organization
      - Vecr 4y ago
        Not anti-vax, they don't want to spend money on something like that. There's a reason the USA spends lots of money on healthcare and the UK does not (though it's obviously relative on a country scale). It's not through magic, it's through spending less money. Spending less money in a healthcare system demands sacrifices, some quite severe.
      - cjrp 4y ago
        They have a detailed explanation here https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vaccinations/chickenpox-vaccine-questions-answers/ https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vaccinations/chickenpox-vaccin...

aaron695 4y ago

sudden_dystopia 4y ago

The path to hell is paved with good intentions.

hgazx 4y ago
I fail to see the good intentions behind not letting you go outside.

bediger4000 4y ago

> Scientists have ruled out any connection with coronavirus or Covid vaccines. Well, that's a relief.

upupandup 4y ago
I just don't buy this. Adenovirus positivity has not increased post-pandemic- and increases in infection are very likely due to increase in testing https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FYg0p7JXoAEg7bw?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FYg0p7JXoAEg7bw?format=jpg&name=... Somebody explain that chart please?
lnyan 4y ago
A retrospective case-series study from Israel: Long COVID-19 Liver Manifestation in Children https://journals.lww.com/jpgn/Abstract/9900/Long_COVID_19_Liver_Manifestation_in_Children.84.aspx https://journals.lww.com/jpgn/Abstract/9900/Long_COVID_19_Li...
isp 4y ago
The scientists say this in the original paper [0]: > we cannot fully exclude a post-COVID-19 immune-mediated phenomenon in susceptible children So explicitly not "ruled out". [0] https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.19.22277425 https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.19.22277425 - see PDF page 14

ed25519FUUU 4y ago

The cause seems to be social distancing preventing necessary exposure to two types of adenovirus. Sounds like another 2nd-order effect from lockdowns that has been disproportionately harder on children than adults. Really glad I moved out of my “pro lockdown” state.

bearjaws 4y ago
~1000 children have this so far, and many have not required a transplant. How many children lost a caregiver due to covid? 140,000. Thousands have lost both parents and are now orphaned. Not to mention the children who have also died of covid.
- procrastitron 4y ago
  Indeed, ~1000 worldwide had any sort of hepatitis at all, whereas over 400 have died from Covid in the U.S. alone. Even if their theory is right about isolation being the cause of the hepatitis cases, then it was still the right thing to do in terms of risk vs. reward.
dfbsdfbwe2ef2e 4y ago
> Really glad I moved out of my “pro lockdown” state. I haven't. This issue affected 1000 thousand people in 35 countries. Did anyone die from this? Covid on the other hand has killed 6 MILLION. Covid could've been solved in 1 month if everyone would just stay home for 1 month. Unfortunately, because of people like you spread noise, we're still stuck with this for the foreseeable future. In addition, let me just comment how mathematically stupid it is to take the 1st order effects just because you're worried about the 2nd order effects.
- shannongreen 4y ago
  > Covid could've been solved in 1 month if everyone would just stay home for 1 month. No, it couldn't. And even if it could've, that would be impossible. Believe it or not, places outside the US did do a 'real lockdown' for a lot longer than a month, and it didn't 'solve' covid.

BaculumMeumEst 4y ago

This is going to terrify people just like stories about infant mortality from COVID terrified people. But the article is talking about infections of 1,000 children across 35 countries. These stories shooting to the front page over and over is giving a distorted view of reality that didn’t exist before social media.

isolli 4y ago
You are right, but widely disseminating these findings is important in order to counter two equally damaging narratives: that acute hepatitis was caused by vaccines, and that it was caused by Covid. In the end, the authors speculate that lockdowns may have been the ultimate cause.
DoingIsLearning 4y ago
> talking about infections of 1,000 children across 35 countries. Just to be accurate these are 1000 _reported_ cases, which are likely very _severe_ cases. I have toddler age kids and I am not interely sure I would be able to distinguish this from another high fever infection. Icteric skin is as far as I know not that noticieable in these cases. So, from a parents perspective, other than slightly whiter poop, without a physician and/or lab work, it would probably just look like one of the other thousands of diseases kids catch in daycare.

yonaguska 4y ago

Scientists and doctors that warned about the health costs of lockdowns on children were cancelled. We really need to set up a Ministry of Ministry of Truth. /s On a serious note, can we ask how we got here? Why were lockdowns so unquestionably pushed? > No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them. However hard it had been to get the fifteen-day shutdown approved, getting another one would be more difficult by many orders of magnitude. Dr Birx from her book. But she's far from the only one to blame.

mhh__ 4y ago
1000 kids across 35 countries, versus the thousands dying every day in some single countries at the time. Warning is one thing, being needlessly contrarian while conveniently not having to make a decision yourself is another.
bandyaboot 4y ago
> Scientists and doctors that warned about the health costs of lockdowns on children were cancelled. Can you cite a few examples?
- ghastmaster 4y ago
  https://gbdeclaration.org/ https://gbdeclaration.org/ The Great Barrington Declaration specifically mentioned physical health of children. It did not specify this particular type of situation though. However, in this article the main author of the declaration did specify: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/27/lockdown-social-distancing-could-make-immune-system-weaker-says/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/27/lockdown-social-... Here are the "cancelled" articles: https://reclaimthenet.org/facebook-deletes-epidemiologists-behind-the-great-barrington-declaration/ https://reclaimthenet.org/facebook-deletes-epidemiologists-b... https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/10/13/big-tech-censors-the-great-barrington-declaration/ https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/10/13/big-tech-censors...

jl6 4y ago

I hope that the legacy of covid lockdowns is a renewed appreciation for the second-order, systemic, and unintended consequences of any action, to be weighed against the direct and intended effects.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
And that the number of cases of people with repeat infections and long covid is considered in assessing whether these lockdowns and restrictions should have been lifted and the disease allowed to spread freely.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- malloci 4y ago
  You would need to counter-balance this with the likely models of death and long covid if lockdowns _hadn’t_ occurred as well. You cannot look at the actual stats without taking those mitigating factors into account.
- EricE 4y ago
  You aren't going to shelter in place a highly contagious airborne virus. Life is not risk free and it's beyond obvious that lockdowns did FAR more harm than good.
roflc0ptic 4y ago
I find myself despairing that almost no lessons were learned, no clear institutional improvements came from these systems. The response to monkey pox is bearing that out. A subset of the left (my team) saying “asking gay men to stop having orgies is homophobic”, totally isomorphic to “being worried about COVID is racist against Chinese people”, one of the initial lines. Then you have the total failure to mobilize an institutional response for contact tracing. There’s not apparently any infrastructure for it, despite how monumentally useful such a thing could have been, would be now. I don’t want another endemic smallpox-related virus, and this virus having lots of hosts to evolve in has some clear second order risks. Likewise, the hostility towards masking is owing to some substantive inability to evaluate second order risks. The initial lockdowns, I think, hold up pretty well in retrospect. Closing schools never really made sense for the children once it was identified that the virus attaches via ACE2 receptors; keeping the schools open was a lot less clearcut for the teachers. You don’t become a schoolteacher because of your high appetite for risk.

amluto 4y ago

I think this is the actual paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.19.22277425v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.19.22277425v... And be careful before attributing this to COVID lockdowns. In the US, at least, there does not actually appear to have been any meaningful increase in hepatitis in young children: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7124e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7124e1.htm The UK could be different for any number of reasons, but, at least in the actual paper and in the US, this does not appear to be COVID-related, even indirectly.

upupandup 4y ago
I'm just concerned that we are not having the debates we used to. They've already coined the term "immunity debt" and Twitter accounts belonging to researchers who are raising alarms about jumping to early conclusions attributing this to lockdowns are curiously enough being brigaded. I'm not saying one thing or the other, I just want to get a nuanced view that is backed by data but hard to do that when those links are getting removed from the platform. I'm just puzzled as to why this is happening
- prometheus76 4y ago
  The data itself is a mess. There are no consistent reporting standards or definitions between countries, or even between states.

CodeWriter23 4y ago

I had no idea the adenovirus vaccine provided immunity to hepatitis.

AstralStorm 4y ago
It does, to adenovirus caused hepatitis and heptitis B or D coincident with adenovirus infection. The adenovirus infection ruins immune response to certain types of hepatitis viruses.

dfbsdfbwe2ef2e 4y ago

Isn't the _actual_ problem here the fact that these kids weren't vaccinated against hepatitis?

recyclelater 4y ago
No because this wasn’t caused by hepatitis virus, but an adenovirus.
- dfbsdfbwe2ef2e 4y ago
  Why weren't they vaccinated against that then?
  - willmadden 4y ago
    There aren't vaccinations against the common cold. A better question is, were their immune systems dysregulated from COVID/COVID vaccination allowing these adenoviruses to cause hepatitis? The paper did NOT investigate this possibility, and the claim that they proved that the two were unrelated is written in weasel speak. What they showed was that COVID and vaccination did not DIRECTLY cause the hepatitis. The elephant in the room is whether COVID and COVID vaccination dysregulated the kids' immune systems, allowing the adenoviruses to flourish and cause the hepatitis. The number of commenters who read the headline and believed everything without reading the study critically is... disappointing.
    - dfbsdfbwe2ef2e 4y ago
      The number of commenters that miss the difference in scale is disappointing. This affected 1000 people in 35 countries. Covid has killed 6 million people so far.
      - willmadden 4y ago
        >Covid has killed 6 million people so far. Based on what definition? The CDC admitted that 94% of the deaths attributed to COVID in the United States were deaths with COVID. The average age of death was the same as the average life expectancy in the US. The average COVID "death" had over two (2) serious comorbidities. I question your number.

willmadden 4y ago

That's a junk article based on a garbage paper making wild speculative claims that lockdowns prevented kids from exposure to cold viruses, somehow resulting in colds giving kids hepatitis. If you read the full text of the paper here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.19.22277425v1.full https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.19.22277425v... you'll see their sample size was insufficient and cherry picked. They only looked at nine (9) cases and fifty eight (58) control subjects. Furthermore, they don't specify their sampling criteria, but they do mention they did NOT include children that were vaccinated in the study. Why? What we do know is that there is emerging evidence that both COVID and COVID vaccination dysregulate the immune system, allowing diseases (like shingles) that are normally suppressed by the immune system until later in life to suddenly appear in young people. Scotland started their child vaccination program in January 2022, around three (3) months in advance of the "worldwide hepatitis outbreak": https://web.archive.org/web/20220124104228/https://www.nhsinform.scot/covid-19-vaccine/the-vaccines/vaccinating-children-aged-5-to-11-years/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220124104228/https://www.nhsin... They need to redo the research, but use a much larger RANDOM sampling of all children who came down with hepatitis, and look for correlations with both COVID infection and COVID vaccination against hepatitis infection. My educated guess is that it had little to do with lockdowns, and much more to do with immune system dysregulation from both COVID and COVID vaccination.

woliveirajr 4y ago

Remembers me about Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL): > Epidemiologic studies indicate that infections in early childhood may protect against pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL)... our results support Greaves’ hypothesis that delayed exposure to infections in early childhood increases risk of ALL. [1] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4100471/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4100471/

MuchoMaas 4y ago
After these pediatric hepatitis cases popped up, there was a vocal contingent of MDs and Zero COVID types on Twitter arguing that it showed the urgent necessity to do whatever it takes to protect children from SARS-CoV-2 infections. It's sad to think that this fearmongering is probably causing a lot of children not to get the pathogen exposure they need in early childhood.

trention 4y ago

This is a hypothesis based on a sample size of 9 and already in the comments people are treating it like gospel while pushing their political agendas. Humanity is really (mostly) unfit to deal with both nuanced information and collective action problems.

Pyramus 4y ago
You make a valid, and ultimately depressing point. I see lots of commentators arguing about 'lockdowns', but very little discussion what actually constitutes 'lockdowns'. Lockdowns in China looked very different to lockdowns in Europa or lockdowns in the US. Lockdowns in 2020, in most countries, were very different to lockdowns in 2022. > Humanity is really (mostly) unfit to deal with both nuanced information and collective action problems. There is a point to be made that the number of collective action problems has increased, relative to one or two generations ago, and will further increase.
- MuchoMaas 4y ago
  > I see lots of commentators arguing about 'lockdowns', but very little discussion what actually constitutes 'lockdowns'. Lockdowns in China looked very different to lockdowns in Europa or lockdowns in the US. Lockdowns in 2020, in most countries, were very different to lockdowns in 2022. I'm not sure why I'm supposed to care about this distinction when they've all proven to be completely ineffective can-kicking at best, enormously costly interventions whose scope was extended well beyond their initial "15 days to slow the spread" mandate for precious little (if any) benefit and an accumulating roster of harms.
  - kcplate 4y ago
    You are supposed to care because effect of policies no longer matters, only the intentions. Pragmatism is apparently a forbidden concept in 2022.
  - trention 4y ago
    >can-kicking at best Covid deaths per 100k population USA 311.7 New Zealand 40.27 Source: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality This is what happens when you "can-kick" infections after vaccination (actually, not even after vaccination but after offering vaccines to the population - and a lot of them stupidly refusing them). As I said: >Humanity is really (mostly) unfit to deal with ... nuanced information

TheBlight 4y ago

This feels like half of the answer.

nikolay 4y ago

Nothing new under the sun - the Hygiene Hypothesis [0] at play! [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

nikolay 4y ago

Should this be categorized as Hepatitis D and require an adenovirus vaccine then?