A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee last week voted unanimously to add the COVID vaccine and the corresponding boosters to the recommended immunization schedule for everyone six months and older. The next step is for the CDC to decide whether to take this advice, which it’s fully expected to do. It’ll be yet another giant mistake by the agency.
Individual states will then choose whether to make the vaccination mandatory for kids to attend school. The CDC isn’t worried, though.
“Moving COVID-19 to the recommended immunization schedule does not impact what vaccines are required for school entrance, if any,” Dr. Nirav Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said. “Local control matters. And we honor that the decision around school entrance for vaccines rests where it did before, which is with the state level, the county level and at the municipal level, if it exists at all.”
This is nonsense. Blue cities and states have used “CDC guidance” as cover to implement the most extreme COVID measures since the beginning. And with Democrats controlling the White House, the administration will force as many states as it can to make the COVID vaccine compulsory for kids.
We’ve had a disastrous few years of guidance out of our nation’s politicized health agencies, and this is just the latest example. The Biden team has informed them what decisions they should reach.
From the CDC allowing a special-interest group, the American Federation of Teachers, to craft school-opening policies, to the administration forcing the Food and Drug Administration to authorize boosters for young people, to Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, saying that Joe Biden’s spending bill had to pass before schools could open, White House politicos are running our health policy, and the results have been catastrophic.
The World Health Organization and UNICEF in July reported that all immunization rates for children have fallen sharply through the pandemic. Part of this is likely the result of disastrous lockdown policies that led to people skipping routine medical care.
But I frequently hear from people who are rethinking their child’s entire immunization schedule in light of the CDC’s behavior on the COVID vaccine for children. These people were never “vaccine skeptics,” but they’ve been lied to about the COVID vaccine and now question everything they’ve heard from these health agencies.
Here’s just one example: In a February piece in these pages, Marty Makary, MD, MPH, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, pointed out that the CDC is outright lying and fudging data about the need for boosters. Makary wrote, “An Israeli population study in the New England Journal of Medicine compared boosted vs. nonboosted people with the primary vaccine series. The risk of COVID death among nonboosted people under age 30 was zero — the same as it was among boosted. A note for college administrators enforcing booster mandates: You can’t reduce a mortality risk of zero any lower with a booster.”
The same is true of the vaccine for children. The COVID mortality risk of a non-vaccinated child is statistically zero. The vaccine simply can’t reduce it any further. So why is the CDC pushing it as if kids have been dying en masse from COVID? The result of forcing this vaccine onto the regular schedule is that parents will look at the other vaccines on the schedule with suspicion.
Part of the problem, from every health official to every Democratic politician implementing their insane suggestions, is that these officials have treated fighting COVID as if it exists in a bubble. But all their policies, like closing schools, locking down our economy and fully lying about the vaccines, have had and will continue to have long-ranging repercussions.
There isn’t a light switch we will at some point flip to get people to trust our health agencies again just like we couldn’t simply restart our economy or get people to go back to their public schools. Instead of rebuilding shattered trust, putting the COVID vaccine on the children’s vaccination schedule is akin to the CDC stomping on the remaining shards on the floor.
Twitter: @Karol
