Thread by @ENirenberg

If anyone is confused about what sealioning looks like, here's a really excellent example.

Multiple physicians, including pediatricians and infectious disease specialists, have presented evidence showing this assumption is incorrect. But he's "just asking questions."

https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1363862731325992962

About half of pediatric flu deaths occur in previously healthy children.
pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/132/5/…

Here's a summary on the 2019-2020 flu season in kids:
cdc.gov/flu/spotlights…

Feigin and Cherry's Pediatric Infectious Diseases also notes the following:

In other words, flu often doesn't act alone. Co-pathogenesis with bacteria is not all that rare, and the virus itself provokes immunological derangements and can remodel the microenvironment of the respiratory tract to promote disease.

nature.com/articles/nrmic…

This idea that influenza can only be a problem for children who have some kind of immunological defects is completely asinine, ableist, and demonstrates a complete failure to understand how infectious diseases work.

To initiate productive infections, pathogens have to subvert host defenses to replicate in spite of them. Influenza has well characterized mechanisms for accomplishing this.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
doi.org/10.1016/j.tim.…
nature.com/articles/nri36…

These include:
- subversion of interferon responses
- becoming insensitive to the interferon effectors
- preventing recognition of virus by the immune system
- forcing cells to die via apoptotic death that prevents effective inflammatory responses needed to combat infection

- within host evolution selecting for escape variants
- infection of cells of the immune system resulting in their death
- prevention of stress granule formation

among others.

The immune system is great. That doesn't mean that pathogens are helpless against it.

The thing people always ignore is that we all evolved together, and influenza is furthermore zoonotic which means that as the host species changes, its adaptations to the environment of one host can make it especially dangerous for other species (e.g. avian influenza in humans).

Vaccination is by far the most important and best way we have to prevent flu, with a possible role for universal masking to be revisited at some point.

cdc.gov/flu/prevent/va….

So yeah, healthy children die from flu and that's not the shocking thing that people think it is. Vaccination can go a long way towards helping prevent that (although unfortunately about 20% of pediatric flu deaths are vaccinated).

Addendum: I'd like people to take note of what happens when you engage people like this.

On being presented evidence on why previously healthy children could succumb to influenza, it was dismissed as them not being healthy because they had some underlying immunological issue.

This is called a goalpost shift, and it's an attempt to preserve the tautology:

1. healthy children don't die of influenza
2. these apparently healthy children died of influenza
3. these children could not have been healthy
4. return to 1

Here's the problem with that thinking: firstly, it's inherently unscientific, as scientific claims must be falsifiable. It is useless to waste time on something that can't be proved false under some form of evidence.

see: Russell's teapot.

But in a more practical sense here's why this is dishonest: when recommendations get made about treatments and screening for flu, it is important to consider who is at risk. Knowing that someone has no apparent risk factors can still succumb to this is important for their care.

If you go by the tautology formulated above, these patients may receive important interventions too late for them to be effective. Maybe a portion of them have occult immunological problems that don't manifest until they catch influenza but that doesn't matter.

As far as we can tell, healthy children can and do die of flu, and it happens a non-trivial amount of time. If new information to show why these children are dying and it's detectable and can be intervened upon that's great. Until then, healthy children can die of flu.