Commentary
In a ghastly new crime against America’s children, particularly those in Democratic states and cities, the CDC
voted on Oct. 20 to add COVID mRNA vaccines to the childhood immunization schedule, paving the way for mandates by left-wing school districts.
The CDC and media fact-checkers were quick to
point out that the CDC cannot impose a national child vaccine mandate—but this is a galling straw-man argument, likely betraying the CDC’s insecurity about what they’ve just done. As the CDC knows, judges have routinely cited deference to the childhood immunization schedule as an adequate basis to uphold vaccine mandates by school districts.
The addition of COVID vaccines to the childhood immunization schedule therefore legalizes mandates imposed by left-wing school districts at the local level, while shielding companies like Pfizer from liability, ensuring that no amount of harm caused by the vaccines will cut into their profits.
According to a
recent study in JAMA, Pfizer’s COVID mRNA vaccine
resulted in hospitalization in one out of every 500 children under the age of five. While this is in line with the rate of hospitalization from other vaccines, the difference is that those vaccines confer benefits against diseases that are actually harmful to children.
By contrast, it has long been known that COVID presents virtually no risk to healthy children. According to
CDC data, COVID’s total mortality rate for all children 0-17 years is approximately 0.002 percent, and just 0.0001 percent for those children 0-17 years without comorbidities.
This means the CDC just gave its imprimatur for mandates of a vaccine that results in a one-in-500 rate of hospitalization, ostensibly to protect against a virus for which the rate of mortality in healthy children is one-in-1,000,000.
Furthermore, it’s an
open question whether COVID vaccines really protect against even that minuscule rate of mortality in children. According to a
recent study in NEJM,
children aged 5-11 who had a prior infection but were NOT vaccinated had a lower risk of being reinfected than did vaccinated children who had a prior infection.
After five months, protection against reinfection for the vaccinated children was negative. For this reason, many governments including those of the
United Kingdom,
Denmark,
Sweden,
Norway, and Finland have suspended their recommendations for child COVID vaccinations.
To speculate as to what may be motivating these CDC officials—aside from sheer greed and groupthink—they may feel justified by the fact that although COVID, in reality, poses virtually no risk to children, many parents in left-wing enclaves believe COVID is extremely harmful to children. They
believe COVID is extremely harmful, studies have shown, largely because their governments imposed draconian lockdowns
knowing they would cause such clear and indelible harms to children.
Thus, the circular logic goes, because their governments would not have caused so much harm to children if they weren’t trying to protect them from something extremely dangerous, COVID must be extremely dangerous. CDC officials may feel that the harms caused to children by COVID vaccines are outweighed by the psychological benefit of setting these parents’ minds at ease.
This is the psychic break by which the
monstrous decision to emulate China’s totalitarian lockdowns across the western world can lead to the indefensible mandating of injections for children with very real harms, but little-if-any benefit, under an indefinite state of emergency more than two years later.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
