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Today’s entry: I’d like for you to dig into the rationale for the vaccinations for children as young as five. Has the country become so desensitized to pandemic BS that we don’t realize how absurd this idea is? We don’t know the long-term implications to immunizing anyone, let alone those in early development and there’s NO NEED!
Bottom Line: Well, I’ll say that while news media’s handling of the CDC’s full authorization of the COVID-19 vaccinations may be treated as just another vaccine news story, parents are not. You’re far from alone in your skepticism. To date, in Florida, the vaccination rate for those aged 12-19 stands at 56%. Clearly about half of parents of older school children have remained skeptical. Those numbers will be dramatically larger as we look younger. A fair amount of polling of parents of young children has been conducted preceding this decision and it’s all pointed in the same direction. Most parents have concerns about having their children vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine and most parents are worried about potential mandates for their children having to obtain them.
As of now, only about a third of parents of children between the ages of 5-11 say they’ll definitely have their children vaccinated with the newly approved COVID-19 vaccine. It’s unlikely that’s going to change anytime soon, especially with rapidly declining cases. Now, what you’ve asked me to do is help make the case against them.
If the primary purpose of obtaining a COVID-19 vaccine is to ward off serious illness, the best/easiest way to measure this would be with the susceptibility to the virus. The CDC keeps tabs on deaths by age, though they’re all done in ranges. The range for children as young as five is actually aggregated with those between the ages of 5-14.
According to the CDC, there have been a total of 748,164 COVID-19 attributed deaths this year among Americans of all ages. Among those are 185 children between the ages of 5-14. The concern over having young children obtain a COVID-19 vaccine is the fear of the unknown down the line. The risk of dire outcomes for young children obtaining the virus is known. The risk of death for children between the ages of 5-14 is proven to be near non-existent. To give you an idea, children between the ages of 5-14 are three to five times as likely to die from pneumonia than COVID-19.
The rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines for young children isn’t medically justifiable based on the data for their health. The idea is that it could be in your interest. If there were complete transparency and intellectual honesty what we’d hear is that health officials are predominantly concerned about asymptomatic children spreading the virus to people who are potentially susceptible such as their parents and grandparents. For this reason, the decision to have your child vaccinated or not to, is most analytically made through that perspective. It’s not really about them it’s about you. And the most honest question of all is this one.
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