A good title to a bad essay.
Dr. Martin Kulldorff wrote an article for the Brownstone Institute titled "Vaccines Save Lives." I might agree with this article. I was dismayed that it argued against vaccinations. He wrote.
The mortality risk between the old and the young is more than a thousand-fold.
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The benefit of the vaccine outweighs the small risks of a serious adverse event for older people who are at high risk of dying from Covid.
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The same is not true for children. The vaccine benefit for healthy children is very small because their Covid mortality risk is less than the annual flu. We don't know if there is more benefit or harm in vaccinations until we know the Covid vaccine risk profile.
There are several problems with these statements.
COVID-19 is worse than the flu for children.
The factual errors and omissions are the first thing we should discuss. The majority of children with COVID-19 will be fine. Children have been harmed more by COVID-19 than the flu. A young child with the flu might fare slightly worse than a child with COVID-19, but it has done more damage than a young child with the flu. The children of New York City were much safer when the disease came to the city than when it did. It's hard to contract the disease, while COVID-19 is impossible to avoid. 30 children have been killed by COVID-19, while no child has contracted the disease. The threat to children from COVID-19 is greater than the threat from E. coli. This is all very basic. My children are able to comprehend these concepts.
The numbers are clear, and anyone who claims the flu is more dangerous than COVID-19 for children is either ignorant, blatantly lying, or trying to trick their readers with word games.
The flu has killed one child in the past two years. According to the CDC, over 1,000 children have died of COVID-19 in the US, and it is one of the leading causes of deaths in children. In normal years, the flu killed less children than COVID-19. According to the CDC.
The number of children who died from the flu has ranged from 37 to 199 since 2004. 358 children died from the H1N1 flu in the US from April to September 2010.
The number of deaths during the H1N1 epidemic was later increased by the CDC. Had the policies of the GBD been widely implemented, the death toll of children would have been lower.
Death is the worst outcome, but it is not the only one. The flu sent 9 children ages 5-11 years to the hospital this year, while COVID-19 sent over 8,300 children this age to the hospital. Over 73,000 children have been hospitalized, and the CDC didn't start collecting data until August 2020. CDC sites estimate that 266,500 children have been hospitalized.
Many of the children were very sick and needed intensive care. Some COVID-19 survivors had strokes. Others had lung transplants or amputations. This may be a substantial undercount, as 5,973 children have had MIS-C thus far. In one study, 80% of children with MIS-C went to the intensive care unit. There have been 52 deaths of children.
The flu is worse for children than COVID-19, which has killed over 1,000 children in the last week alone, according to Dr. Kulldorff. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
Dr. Kulldorff did not include any of the basic numbers in his article. There is a thousand-fold difference in mortality risk between the old and the young, but Dr. Kulldorff didn't include any statistics at all. Readers of Dr. Kulldorff's article won't learn anything about how COVID-19 has affected children.
Dr. Kulldorff wants his readers to know how much he has been affected by this epidemic, an inescapable theme in articles by authors of the GBD. He wrote that he was fired from the CDC for being too pro-vaccine. Dr. Kulldorff wants his readers to know that the fate of the planet hinges on his policies. Not forcing the vaccine on the young or those with natural immunity will save lives but will also keep our country together and may even help keep the world together, he wrote. Many young people are still getting sick because no one is being forced to get vaccine. Dr. Kulldorff might explain in a future article why mass infections of children with a Viruses that will kill a small percentage of them is necessary to keep our country and the world together.
The vaccine can keep children safe.
There is no reason to think that children will react to a vaccine years from now. Vaccines have side effects that are almost always visible within a short time. Millions of children have been given vaccinations. If Dr. Kulldorff can think of a specific thing that might happen in a few years, he should share his thought process. His reasoning seems to be that a bad outcome in the future is not impossible.
The vaccine has proven to be very effective in keeping children alive and out of the hospital. It was no surprise that all of the pediatricians I surveyed decided to have their children vaccinations. The study found that hospitalization rates were 10 times higher for unvaccinated adolescents. The vaccine efficacy was shown in a study of adolescents. It was found.
There were 179 COVID-19 case-patients and 173 were unvaccinated. Of the 77 case-patients who were admitted to an intensive care unit, 77 were admitted with at least one critically ill patient. All 77 case-patients admitted to the intensive care unit, all 29 critically ill case-patients, and both deaths occurred among unvaccinated case-patients.
Dr. Kulldorff doesn't want his readers to know about any of the studies.
Many viruses have long-term sequelae. To the extent that we have to worry about the long-term consequences of anything, COVID-19 is the bigger concern. Dr. Kulldorff doesn't want his readers to know.
There are logical Flaws.
The logical flaws are next. The vaccine benefit for healthy children is very small, so the argument not to vaccine them is ridiculous. This is the same argument that Dr. Kulldorff tried to make. If he was correct that the flu posed a greater risk to children than COVID-19, then children shouldn't bevaccinated against it. I can name many viruses that pose a lower risk to children than COVID-19. The existence of these milder viruses doesn't mean that children should bevaccinated against COVID-19, only that they should bevaccinated against the flu all the time.
Older people are more likely to die of COVID-19. This is true, but useless information like a salesman telling you the car you might purchase costs less than a nuclear submarine. The argument that children don't need vaccines because grandma is in more danger is similar to the argument that sober drivers don't need seat belts because it's more dangerous to drive drunk. I hope that you will be able to see that these comparisons are simply rhetorical sleight of hand tricks used by writers who are desperate to minimize COVID-19's impact on children and are afraid to level with their readers.
Which is safer for children, the vaccine or the virus? My children can easily understand this concept. Readers need to know some basic facts to answer that question. The vaccine is much safer than the virus, which is why there are so many deaths of children every day. If people like Dr. Kulldorff had the courage to share the facts, things might be different.
How sad.
The genre of fact-free articles, full of fantasies of persecution and delusions of grandeur, are pathetic, but they are no longer surprising. Basic information is never provided by contrarians. They know that normal people wouldn't use the word "miniscule" when talking about a virus that has killed over 1,000 children and sent tens of thousands of them to the hospital. We don't talk about children who die in school shootings.
I have never read an essay against vaccinations where the author tried to educate their readers about the basic facts. I think this is important because I talk about it a lot. The doctors know that presenting all the data in a thorough and nuanced manner makes an incredibly strong case to vaccine children against COVID-19, and so they hide the facts and treat myocarditis as a worse fate than death from the virus. A semi-rational author wouldn't include all the relevant facts and still conclude that it's a bad idea to vaccine children. I challenge Dr. Kulldorff and anyone else to prove me wrong by writing such an article.
I don't know what might lead intelligent doctors to make false statements, spread misinformation, and obscure the fact that COVID-19 vaccines can save children's lives, especially in an article titled "Vaccines Save Lives". There was no suggestion in the GBD that the authors would be against vaccinations.
I think Dr. Kulldorff knows that presenting the facts would undermine the rationale behind the GBD. A large number of people in the not vulnerable group would mean that the premise was flawed. It would be a tacit admission that it wasn't a good idea to expose children to the virus in the past, if he knew that it was important to protect children with the vaccine today.
It is easier for contrarian doctors to ignore the consequences of their ideas than to consider they could have been wrong. How sad.
