The German fever gauge, Grippe Web, suggests that nearly one in four German children under 15 are currently suffering some kind of respiratory infection.

The rate is especially high in children under 4, a demographic that has seen elevated rates of illness for over a year now.

This isn’t the vaccines (almost no children under 5 have been vaccinated), and it’s not just a coincidence or a bad year for RSV either. It’s a direct consequence of mass containment. While lockdowns didn’t do much about SARS-2, they appear to have reduced the incidence of other, slower-moving viruses considerably. Young women in particular have been underexposed to RSV for three years now, with the result that their breast milk confers far less passive immunity against common viruses than it did in the pre-pandemic era.

Measures sold to the public as means of keeping our healthcare system from collapsing, have thus resulted in unprecedented pressure on German pediatric treatment facilities and hospitals, with dying children facing delayed operations and long transfers to outlying hospitals. Obviously it doesn’t help that the zealous vaccinators have driven away scarce healthcare staff with their mandates and other pointless harassment. All those people who spent 2021 singing the praises of lockdowns and crowing that they hadn’t had so much as a cold since the pandemic started, should now be made aware of what their policy preferences actually cost. Adults are supposed to get mild upper respiratory infections once in a while. If they don’t, their infants will get them instead, and some will die.