Double children's asthma emergencies in England?
Poking around a provocative news report.
This borderline unreadable post from The Sun caught my eye:
The claim:
THE number of children ending up in hospital with asthma attacks has more than doubled in the last year, data shows.
More than 19,000 kids were admitted in England and Wales from 2021 to 2022, up 149 per cent on the 7,850 recorded in the previous 12 months
That certainly sounds… interesting. Why double asthma emergency visits? An influx of attacks prompted by the modest RSV spike in summer, 2021, or by Delta or Omicron waves? Or delayed effect of chronic masking? Or harms from the experimental Covid vaccines?
But even more importantly — is double of the previous year, that of the lockdowns, actually more than usual?
But as usual with mainstream news, no citation or link to the source data is provided, whereas every proper noun is hyperlinked to useless topic indexes. Either I am an incompetent reader or the nature of the “data” is never even hinted at.
However, I vaguely remembered that the blogger who goes by “Bartram” has posted regarding emergency service use in England before, and revisited his post to find the relevant government site (which may or may not be related to the data reported by The Sun). This is:
Setting expectations: All emergency visits for “kids” nearly doubled in the last reported year, because the year before they were half of normal
“Hospital Accident & Emergency Activity” reports per annums starting in April and until March of the next year. The most recent report was published back in November of last year.
Just to avoid any confounding with pre-lockdown reductions in activity, I have aligned the by-age emergency traffic for 2017-2019 (two years), and 2020-2021 (the lockdown + adult vaccination year, followed by the youth vaccination + post-vaccine year). It’s clear that the lockdown dramatically reduced emergency traffic; and mostly seems like 2021-2022 are in line with the pre-lockdown trend.
All-cause emergency traffic for kids went up 94% and 71% in the period of April 2021 - March 2022; but only because it had been unusually low the previous year.
However, this does not account for a 142% surge in visits for asthma as reported (without source) by The Sun. It is unclear if this difference is because asthma visits were even more reduced than overall visits in 2020-2021, or because the increase truly reflects a surge compared to the previous trend.
Looking at overall (all-ages) asthma visits, and some other interesting codes
The next problem is that “Hospital Accident & Emergency Activity” only reports numbers according to cause of visit (“First diagnosis code”) beginning in the lockdown year, 2020-2021. These reports are labeled as “experimental,” and seemingly rightly so — codes change from the first year to the most recent. So in combination, we have potentially inconsistent use of codes, confounding with the reduced emergency traffic during the lockdown year, and no earlier years to compare with for a better baseline.
Additionally, there is no code here for “childhood asthma,” so we can only look at overall asthma. Interestingly, there isn’t as much of a surge here as reported by The Sun (see below).
If the lockdowns reduced traffic generally, I thought it might be useful to randomly pick some “negative controls” — boring codes with varying degrees of sensitivity to things like freedom to leave the house (e.g., accidents).1 I went with the five codes immediately adjacent asthma in the 2021-2022 report, and then picked two other boring codes, resulting in reasonable-seeming ratio of 1.2 to 1.3 times traffic in year two.
Lastly, just for fun, I picked some codes of interest regarding the Covid vaccines. I chose “neonatal apnea” as a surrogate for neonatal distress in general.
It might seem that many of the selections of interest do not display any remarkable signal compared to the lockdown year — they increase only as much as broken forearms. However, these same codes may have been heightened in the lockdown year by un-diagnosed infections with SARS-CoV-2 that did not receive care until an emergency visit. With no comparison to previous years, it is difficult to say. Moreover, it seems clear that myocarditis is displaying a strong signal vs. other concerns related to the injections (if only because the virus didn’t really drive a lot of events in this code the previous year, compared to strokes and thrombosis).
Obviously, there are hundreds of other codes that could provide interesting insights — but all of them would be subject to the same uncertainty and limitation in the data as these. Therefore, I stuck with a small sample.
Overall impression: Asthma emergencies really did surge in 2021-2022, in a way not convincingly explained by reductions from lockdowns the year before
With an increase of 80%, visits coded for asthma increased much more than my six crudely selected “negative controls,” which were consistently in the 30% territory. This doesn’t tell us how many visits were among children, but an increase of 11,000 kids would certainly fit within the all-ages surge in overall visits.
My best guess, provisionally, of the cause? Delayed effect of masking. Humans are meant to breathe free; and who knows what sorts of allergic and autoimmune issues have been inflicted on kids by forcing them to suck in fabric particles all day long.
Meanwhile, myocarditis visits are consistent with a signal of harms from vaccination; but this is not the least bit surprising given that data from the UK has already shown a clear risk here.2
If you derived value from this post, please drop a few coins in your fact-barista’s tip jar.
The original version of this post mentioned a surge in chronic lung disease in my negative controls; but this was corrected before posting after double-checking the data.
This paper https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.04.535604v1.full, which has only one mention of the mRNA gene therapy:
"However, even without detectable virus RNA in the brain parenchyma, signs of widespread immune activation could be detected18. The lack of evidence for the viral presence and especially viral replication in the brain led to the hypothesis that virus-shed proteins circulating in the bloodstream may promote an inflammatory response independent of direct viral infection of the affected organs, including the brain19,20. Notably, the highly immunogenic spike protein, also used in COVID-19 vaccines21–23, might be a candidate for triggering infection-independent effects.
The spike protein has been shown to affect endothelial function in vitro24–26 and in vivo27,28 and induce TLR2-mediated inflammatory responses in vitro after intraperitoneal injection in mice29, but whether such responses can also be observed in patients has not been thoroughly investigated. However, the long persistence of the spike protein has been shown in the patient’s immune cells (at least 15 months)30 and in the patient’s blood plasma (at least 12 months in a preprint)"
It is amazing that they were allowed to inject so many people with that shit.
Is the uptick in asthma emergencies among children yet another life-threatening consequence of the Covid gene therapy jabs, which have been shown to be capable of degrading the immune system.
"Although asthma and autoimmune disease are thought to have mutually exclusive pathogeneses, they both result from a dysregulated immune system," according to the authors of a study published by Allergy, Asthma & Immunology Research five years ago.
They say their findings "indicate evidence pointing to the presence of autoimmune mechanisms underpinning disease severity in some patients with asthma".
Further independent research needs to be conducted into a possible link, not least because the creators of these injected bioweapons clearly regard children as a prime target for their global experiment.