Pediatrician With 3 Decades of Experience Explores What the Pandemic Taught Us About Kids and COVID
Dr. Stanley Calderwood talks about how he examined the impact of school closures, noting that politics often overshadowed the scientific reality that children are far less vulnerable to the virus than adults.
If you had school-aged children or grandchildren in your care during the pandemic, COVID-19 was that nightmare none of us fully woke up from, leaving this haunting question: "What did these past several years — a tsunami of doubt and contradictions — do to our children?"
While, historically, it has been virtually impossible to sue a school district for educational negligence — for example, graduating kids from high school who are functionally illiterate — COVID opened the floodgates, leading to multimillion-dollar class action settlements across the country to pay for remedial tutoring in basic subjects.
But money alone can't answer those questions that most of us had, and might still have, such as:
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- Was it really necessary to shut down the schools, depriving our kids of not only education, but the development of important social and life skills?
- Was the virus really a fatal risk to young children?
The release of Dr. Anthony Fauci's pandemic diaries could not have come at a better time for many of these issues to be reexamined. In 2020, when the pandemic began, Fauci was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease.
As Southern California pediatrician Dr. Stanley Calderwood asks in his book, COVID-19, Children and the Lasting Impact: A Parent's Guide to the Global Pandemic, published in July, "Did the pandemic response truly protect children, and how can we do better next time?"
Mass of confusing messages
"There was a mass of confusing messages we all heard about the COVID-19 virus and efforts to find treatments and a vaccine," Calderwood noted during our Zoom interview. "But little attention was paid to educating the public in the basic biology of what we were facing — how a virus, like COVID, can infect someone merely if you stand next to them."
His book takes us through a mini course in Infectious Diseases 101. He has a unique ability to break down the science behind what makes us sick and how our bodies are equipped to fight a never-ending war against unseen enemies — and how the science of vaccination has saved so many.
Vaccination helped win the Revolutionary War
And speaking of war, did you know that it was science — yes, science — that played a significant role in our Revolutionary War? "It wasn't only the military brilliance of George Washington that helped to achieve independence," the author pointed out, "but something that took great courage off the battlefield to assure victory on the battlefield.
"A distrust of vaccination developed during the COVID crisis, but most people are completely unaware that in the winter of 1775, George Washington faced two enemies — the British army and smallpox, which had a mortality rate of 30%.
"An early form of vaccination, known as 'variolation,' while controversial, was proven to be effective in preventing the deadly respiratory aspects of the disease. Washington ordered this be administered to recruits who never had smallpox and quarantined those who were infected.
"During the spring offensive, his troops were healthy and encountered little resistance from the British, many of whom were too sick to fight, giving the Continental Army its first significant victory."
Was it necessary to shutter the schools — and the country?
Who can forget the panicked shutdown of human activity during COVID, "as a way, it was thought, of stopping the disease and fatalities. This was flawed reasoning," the author notes. "Several countries did not go into lockdown — Japan, Taiwan, Sweden, for example — and were not worse off for it, as we see in retrospect."
Calderwood's pediatric practice remained open throughout COVID. He and his colleagues gathered a great amount of data on the frequency of infection and symptoms in children, and he draws on more than 30 years of clinical experience in his examination of the virus and the public health response to it.
"The results were striking. Half of the children who tested positive were asymptomatic. They reported no symptoms and had normal vital signs. Almost all the remaining children had only mild or moderate illness, typically recovering within seven to 10 days.
Researchers and physicians across the globe have substantiated these findings. The majority of children with COVID-19 are asymptomatic or have mild disease.
Why do children not become as ill as adults?
Calderwood spends a great deal of time in his book explaining how an infection spreads and tells us why children did not become so ill: "COVID-19 gains entry into cells by binding to the ACE-2 receptor cells on their surface. In children, there are relatively few ACE-2 receptors, significantly limiting the virus' ability to establish serious infection.
"Early in the pandemic, many pediatric infectious specialists understood this and were very cautious about voicing opinions that contradicted the prevailing narrative, afraid to tell it like it was, that COVID-19 would not be a serious infection for children."
Education and the family
Calderwood is most eloquent when he looks at what the lockdown did to children at critical stages in their social development and academic education.
"There is a window of opportunity where the brain is best able to develop language and math skills. Merely by reopening the schools, things do not pick up where they left off. While a short period of closure to slow the virus may have been warranted, we continue to witness the results of our failure to ask, 'What does shuttering schools do to the students? What does it do to families?'"
Calderwood concluded our interview with this cautionary observation: "COVID-19 illustrated what happens when politics and ideology slam the door to science shut. Society will be tested again."
Dennis Beaver practices law in Bakersfield, Calif., and welcomes comments and questions from readers, which may be faxed to (661) 323-7993, or e-mailed to Lagombeaver1@gmail.com. And be sure to visit dennisbeaver.com.
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