“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired. It’s been a rotating door here of sickness. Someone is always sick. Since September, and I don't even know if blaming schools and daycare is the reason. I need family immunity help. Any tips? ” - shared by a mom on social media, December 2024

For many B.C. families, this has been a challenging fall.

B.C. schools restarted during a summer surge of COVID-19 and since then, it’s been a never-ending parade of viruses infecting school children and their families. In the lead up to the holidays, B.C.’s pediatric laboratory RSV test positivity rate was hitting last year’s high of 30 per cent. Meanwhile the pediatric RSV admissions were outpacing last year’s as per the latest report of the Canadian Nosocomial Infection Surveillance Program. At the same time, influenza infections were ramping up.

For parents, this may feel like déjà vu, stirring up memories of the fall of 2022.

Recall the tripledemic of RSV, influenza, and COVID-19 when pharmacies ran out of kids’ tylenol, children’s hospitals ran out of ICU beds, and Children Hospital of Eastern Ontario called in the Red Cross to help.

In the fall of 2022, parents were told to blame “immunity debt" for the surge in children and youths’ respiratory infections. "Immunity debt or gap" was proposed to result from the lack of immune stimulation due to the reduced circulation of microbial agents and reduced vaccine uptake” during the early years of the pandemic.

As Dr. Bonnie Henry, B.C. Provincial Health Officer, explained back then: “The flu season, …hit young people early and hard this year [2022-2023], likely due to their lack of immunity after two years of COVID-19 prevention protocols.” (Jan. 13, 2023, Globe and Mail)

But is this really what’s going on? Many scientists didn’t buy it then, and don’t buy it now. Some have pointed out that increased levels of infectious disease have persisted after several years without widespread mitigations — and kids who weren’t even born yet during lockdowns bear much of the brunt of current infections.. Dr. Satoshi Akima, an Australian Internal Medicine specialist, bluntly stated then, “the 'immunity debt' propaganda… means that if there is a surfeit of infection, this can only have resulted from there previously having been insufficient infections. The solution to excess infections is always more infections.”

Ironically, the authors of the original “immunity debt” article never suggested more infections as a way to fill the gap/debt but rather pushed for the "implementation of reinforced catch-up vaccination programs" with a broadening out of the vaccines being........

© Vancouver Is Awesome