Doctor quits researching COVID because of hostilty over his findings about low risk to children
Jonas Ludvigsson undermined the political argument that schools couldn’t reopen in person with his research findings about COVID-19’s negligible threat to children and minor threat to teachers.
The professor of clinical epidemiology at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute faced such hostility for his findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, that he’s now given up on researching COVID-19, much less debating it.
Ludvigsson’s comments to the Swedish Medical Association were translated from Swedish by The British Medical Journal. He said that he hasn’t been able to sleep more than a few hours for a week as a result of the “angry messages through social media and email” criticizing his study and partly blaming him for Sweden’s contrarian COVID-19 strategy.
His letter to the editor, first published Jan. 6 and listed in the Feb. 18 issue of NEJM, went through several revisions and “formal external peer review,” including statistically, before it was published, Ludvigsson told the association.
The pediatrician’s research focused on children from age 1 to 16 during the first wave of COVID-19 last spring, tracking admissions to intensive care units March 1-June 30. It included those with “laboratory-verified or clinically verified Covid-19, including patients who were admitted for multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children” because it’s “likely” related to COVID-19.
Just 15 children went to the ICU, for a rate of 0.77 per 100,000. Four had “an underlying chronic coexisting condition (cancer in 2, chronic kidney disease in 1, and hematologic disease in 1),” and none died. As for teachers, “fewer than” 10 in preschool and 20 in school went to the ICU during the same period. The schoolteacher ICU rate was about 19 in 100,000.
Relevant to school reopening debates across the globe, Ludvigsson notes that children weren’t wearing face masks. As with the rest of Swedish society, they were simply “encouraged” to practice social distancing.
What’s just as alarming as this suppression of research on COVID is that I’ve read several reports over the past few years about climatologists having their papers rejected by journals and there funding removed if their results question the “settled science” of global warming. Many of those scientists have, like Dr. Ludvigsson, simply quit researching the subject because of the futility of the effort. Their work won’t be published, they are unable to get grants, and if word of what they’re doing gets out, they, also like Dr. Ludvigsson, are savaged.
