Children’s risk of serious illness or death from COVID, which is near zero, is less than the risk from an emergency-authorized vaccine, say many parents.
Children’s risk of serious illness or death from COVID, which is near zero, is less than the risk from an emergency-authorized vaccine, say many parents.
Y ou do realize that we’ll never get out of this pandemic — the mortifications of daily life, the mostly useless non-pharmaceutical interventions, debates about masks, the random closures, and the increasing demands to see your papers or lose your job — if we make ending it conditional on every parent’s volunteering his toddlers for an emergency-authorized dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine.
If you think that it was a big lift to vaccinate everyone who is older than twelve, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
I’m not going to argue that you should or should not vaccinate your tiny, fragile loved ones. How could I? I’m not an expert. I leave that momentous decision to you, your God, and the two most trustworthy institutions on planet earth: Big Pharma with legal immunity and our public-health bureaucrats. When have they ever let us down?
Some people are going to very enthusiastically follow the advice of Big Pharma and the bureaucrats. I’m sure I’m not alone in having many friends who desperately want the FDA to approve a vaccine for children. For them, the moment that their kids are fully vaccinated will be the moment the pandemic is over. That’s when holiday parties can be planned again. Vaccinated Grandma can finally meet her vaccinated posterity. At least, that’s what the health officials say.
Others not so much. I have vaccinated and unvaccinated friends who are preparing themselves to become forgers of medical documents, to move to Texas or Florida, or to become emigrants. Perhaps they’ll find shelter in Europe, where the enthusiasm for mandated interventions in children’s health care has waned much faster than it has in America.
For these friends, it’s the numbers — the numbers showing that kids are safe from COVID-19. David Leonhardt acts as the New York Times czar of conventional wisdom on all things COVID. To his fearful and judgmental audience, he slowly doses out the science — most of it months or even a year old — but at just the pace they can handle and with just enough condemnation of irresponsible COVID-deniers to reassure them that he’s trustworthy.
Last week he finally let them in on the fact that their kids are almost certainly safer than they themselves are. Unvaccinated children are safer, by far, than vaccinated adults, studies show. And there’s hope for even more, Lenohardt breaks it to his readers: “Nationwide statistics from England show an even larger age skew. Children under 12 . . . appear to be at less risk than vaccinated people in their 40s if not 30s.”
Then there is the matter of those heart-related complications for younger people who get a COVID-19 vaccine. Many of the parents who hesitate to have their kids vaccinated must’ve seen that alarming headline out of the U.K. saying that boys are more likely to get myocarditis from the Pfizer vaccine than they are to end up in hospital from COVID-19.
Some of these parents read to the last paragraph of the scare stories about young people dying from COVID-19, and they see that these young people often had some other very serious illness, such as leukemia. One story that went viral on Twitter last week, about a 14-year-old who died from COVID-19, turned out to be about a child who actually died of terminal brain cancer shortly after testing positive for COVID-19.
Other parents are going to hesitate based on experience. Some already have had COVID, and their kids already have had it, and they have been reassured by headlines telling them, finally, that natural immunity provides the best protection from the virus. Others have had the full course of vaccines and suffered mightily from severe aches and chills. And they conclude that the risk of COVID-19 to their kids is not worth the possible side effects. They may know other families whose kids never even got a fever.
Moderna and Pfizer were urged by the government to expand their studies to include children ages five to eleven. USA Today noted last week, “Of the 73 million children in the U.S., fewer than 700 have died of COVID-19 during the course of the pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” So, given how few children get seriously ill from COVID, it would take a massive sample to even begin to show a statistically significant decrease of deaths or other bad outcomes owing to the vaccines.
The United States is unique in the world for its drastic interventions, allegedly on behalf of children — for the loss of school hours we’ve inflicted on them, and for how long we’ve made kids wear masks, every day over the past 18 months. And, unsurprisingly, we are the country moving the fastest and the most anxiously to green-light juvenile vaccines. European countries have been taking it more slowly. The U.K. paused a vaccine-approval process and then picked it up again, as the virus spread in schools and some parents demanded vaccines. But the vaccine was voluntary for families.
We can either close in on the end of this and transition into endemic COVID-19, or we can have another giant round of political fights, where the desire to punish and exclude, or the reality of noncompliance, holds sway. Either way, we need to go into this next phase expecting resistance.