Anti-vaccine influencers continue to try and rewrite the history of the COVID pandemic, minimizing COVID hospitalizations and deaths and overstating COVID vaccine side effects, especially myocarditis. As part of their COVID pandemic revisionism, they also want you to think that COVID wasn’t that bad for kids, but that’s hard to do when you simply take a look at how many kids died with COVID!
How Many Kids Died With COVID?
I bet that there are many more than you think!
As many as 2,390 children and teens may have died with COVID during the pandemic.
Surprisingly, it is hard to tell exactly how many kids died with COVID in the United States.
The CDC also publishes provisional data showing that there were 1,847 deaths, a count that hasn’t been updated in a few years.
To be sure, either count is very high!
As a pediatrician, I can tell you that we don’t expect, and certainly don’t like, that so many kids would die when they get sick with an infectious disease.
But we know that too many kids did die with COVID.
In fact, COVID became a leading cause of death for children in the United States for a few years during the pandemic!
“MIS-C is a serious though rare condition in children in which the body’s own immune system overreacts to a SARS-CoV-2 infection, resulting in inflammation of multiple organ systems throughout the body.”
Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C)
We also know that many died with other complications, like MIS-C.
And that many of those kids were unvaccinated.
Pandemic Revisionism Is Erasing What COVID Did to Kids
Tragically, anti-vaccine influencers have been pushing misinformation to get you to forget about all of those deaths.
Don’t let them!
Remember what the evidence actually shows.
“In this study, toddlers with prenatal and postnatal as well as those with only postnatal COVID-19 pandemic exposure showed fewer internalizing and externalizing problems than those born and assessed prior to the onset of the pandemic.”
COVID-19 Pandemic Exposure and Toddler Behavioral Health in the ECHO Program
For example, wearing masks during the pandemic wasn’t dangerous and didn’t create an epidemic of kids with “social autism,” as some have proposed.
Sure, actions taken during the pandemic had some negative effects, but the lockdown skeptics never mention the alternative – more people getting sick and dying if nothing had been done.
And tragically, that’s something we might see now with these same lockdown skeptics in charge of our public health systems as rates of vaccine-preventable disease increase and there is still a risk of a new pandemic.
More on Pandemic Revisionism
- Who to Trust About Public Health Information and Advice?
- How the Modern Anti-Vaccine Movement Resembles a Religious Cult
- Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C)
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. National Vital Statistics System, Provisional Mortality on CDC WONDER Online Database.
- Provisional COVID-19 Deaths: Focus on Ages 0-18 Years. National Center for Health Statistics
- COVID-19 Pandemic Exposure and Toddler Behavioral Health in the ECHO Program
- Closing schools in the pandemic was bad. Keeping them all open would have been worse
- Three years on, there is a new generation of lockdown sceptics – and they’re rewriting history
- Trump names COVID lockdown skeptic to lead NIH, another sign of shifts in key agencies
- No, lockdown sceptics have not been vindicated
- Mike Yeadon wrong again on lockdowns and face masks
- Posts falsely claim face mask use harms children
- Child mortality and COVID-19
- COVID-19 is a leading cause of death in children and young people in the US
Last Updated on March 9, 2026
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