Tag Archives: Children

Children & Teens, Mass shootings, Schools

Fact Check: Gun violence surpasses car accidents as the leading cause of death for people ages 1 to 19

March 29, 2023 Roger Straw

A young girl places on March 28, 2023, places an item at a growing memorial for the victims of the shooting at the entry to The Covenant School in Nashville, Tenn. (AP)

PolitiFact, by Amy Sherman, March 29, 2023

A woman who survived a mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, in 2022 made a passionate plea for gun safety legislation in front of TV cameras after a mass school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee.

Mom and mass shooting survivor Ashbey Beasley

After a police official finished a briefing on the deadly school shooting that left three 9 year olds and three adults dead, Ashbey Beasley stepped in front of the microphones.

“How is this still happening? How are our children still dying and why are we failing them? Gun violence is the number one killer of children and teens — it has overtaken cars,” Beasley said March 27.

Beasley told PolitiFact that she was in Washington, D.C., on March 24 to attend the Generation Lockdown rally, where activists and lawmakers gathered to support an assault weapons ban, and then traveled to Nashville to see family and a friend. Beasley became a gun safety activist after she and her son, then 6 years old, survived the Highland Park mass shooting during a July 4 parade.

After previous mass shootings, including at a school in Uvalde, Texas, we fact-checked U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who said that “the leading cause of death among children is a firearm.” We rated his statement Mostly True based on analyses of 2020 federal data. The same finding holds true for 2021 data on children and teenagers ages 1 to 19.

Data shows firearm deaths surpassed motor vehicle deaths

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes data on the leading causes of death among different demographic groups.

CDC data for 2021 shows that 23,198 people ages 1 to 19 died in 2021. Firearm deaths, 4,733, were the No. 1 cause. Motor vehicle traffic deaths ranked second at 4,048.

This data is similar to what researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions found when they analyzed CDC data for 2020 deaths. The lead researcher for that report confirmed that the same point held true for 2021.

Beasley told us she is careful to say “children and teens” because she has heard people dispute the statement when someone refers only to “children.” She told us she got the 2021 statistic from Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control advocacy group.

Generally, researchers say they don’t include infants in their analyses because of certain conditions unique to babies.

It is technically correct to say that firearms are the leading cause of death for people aged 1 to 19 when they are combined into a single group, said Veronica Pear, an assistant professor in the Violence Prevention Research Program at University of California, Davis.

“This is an eye-catching and powerful statistic, so I get why people use it,” Pear said.

But Pear warned that someone could wrongly interpret the statement to mean that firearms are the leading cause of death for each individual age within the 1 to 19 range.

Firearm-related deaths are exceedingly rare among babies and young children, while teenagers, especially older teenagers, have very high rates of dying from firearm-related injuries, Pear said.

“When all these ages are pooled together, the very high rates among teens are swamping the very low rate among young kids, such that firearms are the leading cause of death for the group as a whole,” Pear said.

The Nashville shooting occurred at The Covenant School, a small private Christian school serving preschool through sixth grade. If we look at death data for ages 3 to 12, it shows firearms as the sixth leading cause.

However, researchers we interviewed said it is valid to look at firearm deaths for ages 1 to 19. David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, told us there is no official definition of “children.”

Hemenway co-wrote a perspective article for the New England Journal of Medicine about causes of death for people ages 1 to 24.

“For more than 60 years, motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of injury-related death among young people. Beginning in 2017, however, firearm-related injuries took their place to become the most common cause of death from injury,” the article said. “This change occurred because of both the rising number of firearm-related deaths in this age group and the nearly continuous reduction in deaths from motor vehicle crashes.”

The CDC cites the 15 leading causes of death for people ages 1 to 19, but it does not pluck out firearm deaths. This data shows the top causes of death are accidents, homicide and suicide — all cagetories that include some firearm-related deaths.

The CDC does not classify firearms as a cause of death, but rather as a mechanism by which death occurs. “So, while our data does not allow us to say that firearms are the leading cause of death for this age group, it does show that firearms are the leading mechanism of injury mortality,” Brian Tsai, a CDC National Center of Health Statistics spokesperson, told PolitiFact.

Patrick M. Carter, co-director of the Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention at the University of Michigan, and Philip Cook, a professor emeritus at Duke University and gun researcher, both told us they agree it is accurate to say that in the 1 to 19 age category firearms are the leading cause of death.

PolitiFact ruling

Beasley said, “Gun violence is the number one killer of children and teens — it has overtaken cars.”

CDC data for 2021 shows that for people ages 1 to 19, firearm-related deaths ranked No. 1, followed by deaths from car accidents.

That’s for the age range as a whole; it is not the leading cause of death for each age in that group. Firearm-related deaths are far more common among older teenagers than among young children.

We rate this statement Mostly True. [See the sources for this fact-check]

PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird and Senior Correspondent Louis Jacobson contributed to this report.

Children & Teens, Gun violence, Schools

Analysis: The U.S. Is the Only Country Among Its Peers in Which Guns Are the Leading Cause of Death Among Children and Teens

March 29, 2023 Roger Straw

KFF Analysis Finds Firearms are the Leading Cause of Death for Children in the United States but Rank No Higher Than Fifth in Other Industrialized Nations

Sierra Sun Times, July 9, 2022

Firearms are now the number one cause of death for children in the United States, but rank no higher than fifth in 11 other large and wealthy countries, a new KFF analysis finds.

Guns – including accidental deaths, suicides, and homicides – killed 4,357 children (ages 1-19 years old) in the United States in 2020, or roughly 5.6 per 100,000 children.

In each of the peer countries, guns kill fewer children than motor vehicles, cancer, congenital diseases, and other injuries, and often behind other conditions such as heart disease.

The U.S. is the only country among its peers that has seen a substantial increase in the rate of child firearm deaths in the last two decades (42%). All comparably large and wealthy countries have seen child firearm deaths fall since 2000. These peer nations had an average child firearm death rate of 0.5 per 100,000 children in the year 2000, falling 56% to 0.3 per 100,000 children in 2019.
Source: Kaiser Family Foundation

Source: Kaiser Family Foundation, study by Matt McGough, Krutika Amin, Nirmita Panchal and Cynthia Cox, Jul 08, 2022

Children, Coronavirus, Covid 19, Solano County Health Officer Bela Matyas, Youth ages 5-11

Dr. Matyas shares details on child’s COVID death

December 21, 2021 Roger Straw

The child actually died a month ago, had been ill for a month before that, and had no underling health conditions

CDC vaccinations for children and teens: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/recommendations/children-teens.html

Solano health officer calls ‘tragic’ the death of infant to Covid-19

Fairfield Daily Republic, by Todd R. Hansen, December 21, 2021

FAIRFIELD — Solano County has reported the first death of a child due to Covid-19.

The infant, younger than 1 year old, died about a month ago and had been ill for about a month prior to that, Dr. Bela Matyas, the county public health officer, said in a phone interview Monday.

“It’s tragic,” he said.

It takes the total of Covid-related deaths to 342, the county reported.

The child “did not appear to have any underlying health conditions . . . and, of course, the child was not vaccinated,” Matyas said.

Children that young are not allowed to be immunized.

Matyas said the infant contracted the virus almost certainly by being exposed to someone with the disease, probably a family member or friend, and, he added, it was far more likely from someone who had not been vaccinated.

That is especially true if the person who transmitted the disease was asymptomatic and did not know he or she was infected.

While the Public Health Division is investigating in hopes of learning how the child was exposed, Matyas said a clear answer may not be possible.

“We may never know,” Matyas said.

The county reported 128 new coronavirus cases, 112 of which were from the past three days. It takes the total to 47,892.

The number of residents who were hospitalized Monday with the disease was 19, with six in intensive care units. That compares to 22 hospitalized Friday and five in the ICU, the county reported.

The 10-day daily case average was 37.7, up slightly from Friday’s report of 36.9.

Vaccination rates held steady at 66% of residents 5 or older being fully vaccinated and 77% of that population receiving at least one shot. There have been 84,334 booster shots administered, up from Friday’s total of 81,294, the county reported.

The report stated 18.7% of 5- to 11-year-olds have received a vaccination shot.

Fairfield added 36 new cases to take its total to 12,803. Vallejo added 33 for a new count of 13,950. Vacaville had 12,651 cases after 38 additions, the county reported.

Suisun City (3,390) added four new cases; Dixon (2,643) added nine; Benicia (1,660) added seven; Rio Vista (644) added one; and there were no new cases in the unincorporated area of the county (151), the report states.

The seven-day positivity testing rate was 5.4%, up from 5% Friday.

County public health officials do not post case updates on Tuesdays. The next update is scheduled late Wednesday afternoon.

Children, Coronavirus, Covid 19, Vaccine, Vaccine mandate

SF Chronicle on COVID vaccine exemptions: unvaccinated people put young children at risk

October 19, 2021 Roger Straw

Editorial: Vaccine mandates work. But not if California gives fake ‘personal belief exemptions’ a pass

San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Board, Oct. 17, 2021

Lower doses of vaccine work for children.

In January 2015, an outbreak of measles that started at Disneyland in Anaheim spread across California and eventually throughout North America. All told, the virus made its way to seven U.S. states, Mexico and Canada, infecting 159 people, the vast majority of whom were unvaccinated.

A Center for Disease Control and Prevention study of the Americans who were infected found that most were either too young to receive a vaccine or declined to be vaccinated, citing personal reasons. The natural conclusion was that unvaccinated people put young children at risk. And that “personal belief exemptions” from vaccine mandates can be dangerous loopholes that empower irrational objections to inoculation and endanger public health.

In the aftermath of this outbreak and several others in California, state Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, a pediatrician, introduced legislation to crack down on lax personal belief and medical exemptions for otherwise mandatory school vaccinations. That bill, SB277, received huge pushback from the burgeoning anti-vax movement, with actress Jenny McCarthy among others, stirring up opposition. But the effort was eventually victorious; it is now very difficult in California for parents to get their kids a medical or personal exemption from traditional childhood immunizations for 10 serious illnesses (such as polio) without legitimate reasons.

Just because your kid is allergic to cats doesn’t mean they’re allergic to vaccines. They need to get their shots.

And yet concessions made to pass the bill now have implications for COVID. SB277 did not anticipate future outbreaks of new diseases that would require vaccination. As such, the law includes an amendment that allows the governor and public authorities to unilaterally issue new vaccine mandates “only if exemptions are allowed for both medical reasons and personal beliefs.”

And so, with COVID exemptions, we’re effectively back to square one. Gov. Gavin Newsom and his public health authorities can (and did) mandate Food and Drug Administration-approved COVID shots as a prerequisite for attending in-person schooling. But removing the same specious personal belief and medical exemptions that we did in 2016 will require the Legislature to act.

It should. Californians have already proven themselves adept at exploiting the old exemptions. And the incoherent opposition to safe and effective vaccines, sadly, is now stronger with backers who are far more formidable than McCarthy.

All indications are that COVID will become endemic, meaning it will be with us in one form or another in perpetuity. While this sounds terrifying, it doesn’t have to be. Vaccines can protect us from serious COVID illness and death. But none of us are born immune. Just like with measles and polio, each passing generation will need to be inoculated. Without vaccines, this virus will continue to kill. Which is why mandating shots for the young is so essential.

Schools are the logical place for society to make its stand and stop COVID’s deadly rampage for good. Everyone is entitled to an education, but vaccination is an appropriate exchange. Moreover, the current status quo of constant testing and quarantines is unsustainable.

“Think about how much schools are spending on COVID control,” says Pan. “Those are resources pulled away from primary education. Vaccinating kids means less spending on COVID control and more on their education.”

The Legislature is out of session until 2022. But when it returns, amending state public health laws for the COVID-era will be imperative. California doesn’t just need to pave the way for mass COVID vaccinations, it needs to give public health authorities the flexibility they need to deal with future emergencies.

What happens when a new pandemic arises that requires a new vaccine? The legislative process takes time. And in public health emergencies, time is too precious to waste fighting the Jenny McCarthys of the world.

The Pfizer COVID vaccine is now fully approved by the FDA for people age 16 and over. Emergency authorization for kids 12-15 is in effect, and it could be granted for kids age 5-11 by Halloween.

Vaccine mandates work. They can and will help neuter COVID and keep it from re-emerging as a deadly threat. They can do the same for future infectious diseases where safe and effective vaccines are made available. But danger will linger if California doesn’t put a permanent stop to the fake excuses for avoiding vaccines.

This commentary is from The Chronicle’s editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.