Given December is such a busy time and corporate media was so pre-occupied with everything but reality, it’s understandable that you may have missed the following story. It turns out that in December, New York Magazine ran a story headlined, “Why Spending Time With Kids Might Actually Help Protect You From COVID.” In a nutshell, surprising only to the researchers mind you, they arrived at this revelation, “exposure to young children was strongly associated with less severe COVID-19 illness.”

Of course anyone without “expert” at the end of their name could have told them this, and saved them countless hours and dollars but hey they’re experts what you gonna do. So, looking at this logically, that means hysterical chicken little “sky is falling” teachers demanding protection during the pandemic from all those little spawns of Satan, were actually hurting themselves. Ironic huh?

Specifically, the study’s researchers reviewed the medical records of more than three million adults in the Kaiser Permanente Northern California health system and found that the beneficial effect of being around kids wasn’t just a little statistical signal. It was, in the words of Trump, huge:

Quoted from the study, “Those without identifiable household exposure to children based on health insurance enrollment had a 27% higher rate of COVID-19 hospitalization and a 49% higher rate of COVID-19 hospitalization requiring ICU admission than those with young children.”

So once again, looks like the experts got that one wrong, too, even though they knew better. It’s a wonder that folks still blindly follow folks who can’t seem to get anything right? So, how could munchkins help protect from serious covid? Now before I tell you, I must first warn you that’s it so radical and outside the box that you’ll see how the experts could have missed it. Ready, the radical theory proposed by the study authors is that people’s immune systems need exposure to germs in order to work well. Mind blowing huh, who could have ever thought such a thing was possible? Well certainly not teachers!

The biggest take away from the article is that New York Magazine describes the findings as “counterintuitive:”
“Taken together, the findings suggest that social distancing and isolation at a population level, particularly from young children, may have counterintuitively put some people at /greater/ risk of COVID infection or severe disease once they resumed normal contact. (Several of the experts I spoke with noted that this doesn’t mean social distancing wasn’t beneficial for those at high risk of bad outcomes who were able to remain uninfected until they were vaccinated.)

Now setting aside the disclaimer about the high-risk folks, seems the article’s experts are now saying that this is a “nothing burger”, not really breaking news, we knew this all along and quite frankly what we expected of course. Which means this must be a new set of enlightened experts, not sure what they did with the ones that had been enlightening us over the past two years. Not sure about you, but I for one think that this, new I mean old “commonly known” information, would have been worth mentioning a little while ago, who knows it might have even led to keeping a few schools open, but then again that was never the goal, right teachers unions?

Link to the New York Magazine article:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/12/spending-time-with-kids-might-help-protect-adults-from-covid.html
Link to the study is in the notes below:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2213783119