Dear. Z DoggMD
You referred to yourself as the biggest advocate for vaccination on social media. You have hosted credible individuals like Dr. Paul Offit who spoke about the dangers of COVID-19 and how the vaccine can prevent these harms. You posted a video of your daughter getting vaccine. I am glad she is safe, and the video helped others decide to have their children vaccinations. I think the video you made on vaccine safety was fair and the discussion of vaccine myths was reasonable. You say you helped convince people to get vaccinations. I'm sure this is true. We all benefit from this success.
I compiled several facts about the vaccine and about the virus children that every doctor who advocates for vaccines should share as widely as possible. Not all of the facts about the vaccine are positive. I think we agree that balance is important. I don't mean to say that you haven't shared it. You have shared a lot of information about how the virus has hurt children.
There are facts about children.
Almost all kids will be fine. A child who contracts COVID-19 has a low risk of dying. The only good thing about the virus is that it mostly protects children from severe disease.
Millions of children have contracted the virus and rare harms have added up, even though a child who contracts COVID-19 has an extremely low risk of dying. The COVID-19 data tracker shows that the virus has killed 1,131 children in the past 6 months. Approximately 1 in 65,000 children in America have already died of COVID-19. Teenagers who were eligible for the vaccine and children without underlying conditions are included. Obesity and asthma are the most common underlying conditions for children who die from COVID-19. Many decades of life were lost by these children.
Death is the worst outcome from COVID-19, but it is not the only bad one. Around 100,000 children have been hospitalized due to COVID-19. About 1 in 740 American children have been hospitalized with COVID-19. More children are being hospitalized because they are getting infections than before. 904 children are being hospitalized every day with COVID-19. The recent omicron surge in New York City had a high proportion of hospitalized children with no comorbidities. The majority of admissions were from trauma. Up to 30% of children need intensive care and 10% need intubation when they stay a few days. Children rarely need amputations or lung transplants. The frontline pediatricians say that the omicron variant is milder than the delta variant, however the increased number of infections means that rare harms are still accumulating. It is misleading to compare the rates of myocarditis between the vaccine and the virus. The virus can do more than just cause myocarditis.
There have been at least 6,431 cases of myocarditis in the US, possibly many more. 55 children have died from this. Studies have shown that children with MIS-C have cardiovascular problems. Cardiac arrhythmias have led to hemodynamic collapse and need for. This doesn't happen with the vaccine.
We don't know a lot about long-COVID in children, and some children are sick for a long time.
The number of kids who have lost a parent is estimated to be 167,000.
There are facts about the vaccine.
The vaccine can keep adolescents healthy, alive, and out of the hospital, and pro-vaccine doctors should share this information as often as possible.
In hospitalized adolescents, 179 of them were unvaccinated and six of them werevaccinated. 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.
Hospitalization rates were 10 times higher among unvaccinated adolescents.
One of the patients hospitalized for COVID-19 was fully vaccine-eligible.
The vaccine's effectiveness was 98% against the infections.
There were 97 children who were unvaccinated. None of the unvaccinated MIS-C patients required respiratory or cardiovascular life support compared to the 5 vaccine-vaccinated patients.
There were 33 adolescents with MIS-C eligible for the vaccine.
Only 2 patients in the intensive care unit had been fully vaccined, and 180 patients were admitted to the hospital. The vaccine was effective against hospitalization for Covid-19. The receipt of life support was 98% against Covid-19. The 7 deaths were caused by patients who were unvaccinated.
The vaccine may be less effective against future variants. The majority of children who were admitted to the hospital during NYC's omicron surge were unvaccinated.
There are facts about the vaccine.
The rate of vaccine myocarditis varies from study to study, but it is a concern for adolescent boys after their second vaccine dose. One study from Hong Kong found a rate of 1 in 2,700 for male adolescents after their second shot, while another found no increased rate in young men from the Pfizer vaccine. There is a rate in between the two extremes. The rate of about 1 in 7,000 adolescent boys after their second shot seems reasonable, based on the available studies. The Moderna vaccine is riskier than the Pfizer vaccine, but a long interval between the two doses lowers the risk. Younger children and boosters have a lower risk than this. I am confident that the number of times each of us has discussed this topic exceeds the number of children currently hospitalized with it, as very few adolescents are getting their second shot currently.
The exact rate of vaccine myocarditis isn't clear, but it is less severe than viral myocarditis. The virus can cause much more than myocarditis, and this is often overlooked by those who only compare the rates of the two conditions. Government agencies in different countries have consistently positive short-term outcomes for vaccine-myocarditis. Most vaccine-associated myocarditis events have been mild and self-limiting, and most cases of suspected COVID-19 vaccine-related myocarditis in people younger than 21 are mild and resolve quickly. No child in the world has needed to be intubated as far as I know. After a follow-up, most are symptom-free. The experts agree that there is no danger signal that would outweigh the benefit of vaccination. One person said that every hospital has a covid ward. We both agree that long-term monitoring for potential cardiac scarring is needed, and that the condition should not be minimized.
I wouldn't consider you the biggest advocate for vaccine on social media.
I would not consider you to be the biggest advocate for vaccination on social media when it comes to children, because you have acknowledged the many positive contributions you have made to children. There is a lot of misinformation about COVID-19 and children. Vital information is not mentioned.
I apologize if you missed it, but I haven't heard you mention any of the studies showing vaccines protect adolescents. You did not mention the two studies that preceded the videos. The vaccine can cause myocarditis. I wrote several detailed, nuanced articles on this topic where I argued that vaccine-myocarditis should not be trivialized. The vaccine is very effective at preventing rare, but catastrophic outcomes in adolescents. Do you think parents should be aware of this information?
I would love to be proven wrong, but I don't think there will ever be a segment on your show about the vaccine works in adolescents. When you think about it, it's amazing. Shouldn't the biggest advocate for vaccination on social media be willing to share accurate information about the vaccine for children at every opportunity? The biggest advocate for vaccinations on social media should have shared the results multiple times already. If these studies showed the vaccine didn't work, you and Dr. Prasad would have talked about it a lot. I don't think this approach is "nuanced" or "alt-middle".
You have made problematic statements about children. You questioned whether the school closings were justified in the past.
Even though this thing has killed less than you know, or about as many as flu would kill in a normal year in kids, I say hardly any. It is not compassionate to the people who have lost children. Right?
Right.
I have never argued for closing schools, but this is an extremely misleading comparison and inappropriate way for the biggest advocate for vaccine on social media to speak about dead children. The number of children who died of COVID-19 would have been much higher without the measures taken. I don't think 300 dead children is "hardly any." We don't talk about the children who die in school shootings. We routinely vaccine children for diseases that kill less children.
It is true that at that point COVID-19 had killed about the same number of children as a bad flu season, a disease for which we vaccine children. It makes no sense to compare the death tolls of the two viruses. The flu was obliterated by the measures that were put in place. One child died of the flu during the time period when 300 children were killed by COVID-19. Even though your guests often claim otherwise, anyone who knows anything about children knows that COVID-19 is deadlier than the flu. Since they heard misinformation, they will be misled. This is a pattern that I will discuss.
You have guests who spread false information about children.
You have platformed guests who spread false information about COVID-19 and children, always overstating harms of the vaccine, and you have minimized the dangers of the virus. I am not talking about doctors who have different opinions about vaccine mandates or the need for boosters in young people. Many of your guests get the most basic facts wrong over and over again, or they are just plain dishonest. It has been fascinating to watch how myths about COVID-19 and children get created in the closed media echo chamber of contrarian doctors and then disseminated on Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, influencing policy for large parts of the country with tragic consequences. Those who seek to provide accurate information are accused of groupthink.
There has never been a documented case of an entirely healthy kid dying of carbon dioxide. He claimed that no healthy child had died of carbon dioxide. 3 children with underlying conditions died of carbon dioxide. There was not a single healthy kid who died, according to Dr. Markary. He neglected to mention that his analysis only reported on a small number of deaths.
It is extremely rare for a healthy child to die of COVID-19, but several had by the time Dr. Makary made his false claim. He was spreading misinformation to your audience after just 5 seconds of searching. About 25% of the people studied were healthy, information that was available when Dr. Markary made his false claim. Obesity and asthma are the most common underlying conditions in children who die of COVID-19. Who was aware that your discussion with him about "COVID-19 Fake News" was a preview of attractions?
Dr. Prasad spread misinformation in the "Should We Vaccinated Kids for COVID" show. The flu killed 4 children in the past two years. The flu hospitalized 9 children this age in the same time period when COVID-19 hospitalized over 8,300 children. COVID-19 isn't as severe as flu for children, but your audience will think that it is.
The risk of a child dying of COVID was about one in a million, and it was necessary to inoculate a million kids with vaccine to save one life. He said that a death rate of 1 in a million would necessitate 227 million infections. There are 74 million children in the USA. This is false if at least 300% of American children had contracted COVID-19 by this time last year.
Fear, Uncertainly, and Doubt are some of the things your guests have created.
Many of your guests have labored to create fear and doubt about vaccinations, in addition to downplaying the severity of COVID-19 for children. Dr. Makary spread misinformation about the vaccine, saying that no healthy child ages 5-11 died of COVID-19 and that he expected 15 to die from the vax 2nd dose. A lot of people trust him despite this being anti-vaccine nonsense. There were 11 verified myocarditis cases after 8.7 million vaccine doses, and 7 of them have recovered. There were no children who died.
The Emergency Use Authorization for children was opposed by Dr. Prasad. In May 2021, he claimed that an EUA for children was not needed since COVID-19 would no longer threaten children. I pointed out at the time that Dr. Prasad neglected the possibility of new vaccine variations and overestimation of vaccine take-up in adults. I have previously criticized his writing for its lack of detail and omission of important facts. The doctor suggested on your show that the EUA could be weakened by a child having a fever after a vaccine. You said, "Imagine you do this to hundreds of thousands of children." You are going to have a certain number of complications just by happenstance.
Fortunately regulators with skin in the game used accurate numbers, didn't panic about post-vaccine symptoms, and issued an EUA for children. No healthy child under the age of 16 would be vaccine free today if they had taken Dr. Prasad's advice. Your daughter, my son, and their entire classroom would be unvaccinated. Is it possible that schools could stay open? Absolutely not. They are having a hard time.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is one of your guests who does not want children to bevaccinated against COVID-19. I think it is a mistake to think about the risk of death from COVID, if there is any good reason to vaccine young kids. It isn't good for kids. How is this different from what Andrew Wakefield might say? It is, of course.
It gets worse. He wrote that the Ill-Advised Push to Vaccinate the Young was an article.
The anti-vax idea that no one should bevaccinated is as misguided as the idea that everyone must bevaccinated. The latter is more dangerous for public health.
In the middle of the worst Pandemic in 100 years, he feels it is more dangerous for public health to give everyone a vaccine. He wants children who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus.
You gave him a microphone multiple times and portrayed him as a sympathetic victim. You lavished him with praise, telling him that he was fearless, compassionate, and rational. That is how I feel about frontline pediatricians taking care of sick children in the intensive care unit or begging parents to get their child vaccinations. I don't think you are the biggest advocate for vaccinations on social media when it comes to children.
You gave Dr. Bhattacharya a platform to spread misinformation. He claimed that early in the epidemic, we are killing patients with ventilators. I wonder who he is talking about. He has never been able to treat a COVID-19 patient. He is happy to spread baseless conspiracy theories about doctors who actually have real-world responsibility for treating COVID-19. There is no evidence that doctors killed patients through aggressive intubations, and it is contrary to all the available evidence. Listeners won't know that. The internet rumor that the people died from not using COVID-19 was a dangerous one given the violence against healthcare workers today.
Even though hundreds of children had died of COVID-19 and tens of thousands had been hospitalized, Dr. Bhattacharya said children's risk of COVID is quite small. Few of your guests are willing to discuss how COVID-19 has harmed children. They are not stupid. Hundreds of dead children and tens of thousands of hospitalized children are not something to brush off.
The risk of suicide in non-COVID times is typically 10 times higher, instead of simply stating the facts. There is absolutely no connection between this and whether children should bevaccinated against COVID-19. I talked about why these factoids are useless and how they are being used to distract people from the danger COVID-19 poses to children. It is true that COVID-19 has killed more children than any other cause.
There is a chance that children will miss two days of school because they have headaches, fever, and muscle aches from the vaccine, according to Dr. Bhattacharya. You agreed that you are assuming all the risks with no benefits if the risk is small. It didn't occur to either of you that children could bevaccinated on a Friday or that they might miss school.
The Pandemic Over has been declared by you and your guests.
You and your guests have repeatedly declared the end of the Pandemic. You told Dr. Makary about his herd immunity prediction in May 2021.
You were pretty much right about everything, and the left probably thought that the fascists on Fox News were saying that this thing is over.
The left was correct about Dr. Makary's ridiculous prediction. Would a vaccine advocate mock the virus by saying "variants, shmariants"? You did that many times. The End of the Pandemic was a comedy show hosted by Dr. Monica Gandhi and titled "variants, shmariants". You warned about panic and fear, not the virus.
You mocked a young couple you saw on a plane for wearing two masks, a full goggles, like they were flying a plane. You said this cautious behavior was a pet peeve of yours and that young, healthy people need to be out doing their thing. They are hiding behind two face shields. The passengers bothered you so much that you mocked them on a subsequent show. It looks cool, but not really. You spoke out against the idea ofshaming parents for not getting their kids vaccinations. I agree. Young people who are trying hard to avoid the virus are okay being shamed. Do you think they are doing something wrong?
Dr. Prasad seems to think that way. On a day when 3,322 Americans died, he joked.
I want to write a children's book about a bear who didn't want to leave until it was safe. He was never gone and life passed him by.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died as a result of that joke. You could say that life passed them by.
In May 2020 you said that the variant isn't driving a lot of that poor outcome, after the ravished India. You said that hope is accurate. It isn't like we're slinging a lie. The death rate remained low, but the delta variant would kill hundreds of American children, including unvaccinated teens. Hope is not always accurate. The virus has shown that it doesn't listen to doctors who say we need to stop living in fear.
The idea that anyone who tries to avoid the virus is living in fear is a common theme for contrarian doctors. I have never understood fear. I had to take medication to sleep for the first time because I had nightmares before COVID-19 hit NYC. I was spared the worst of it, but in nearby hospitals they had to use forklift to move dead bodies. I hope the people who had to do that are doing well. Thousands of people have died from the Pandemic, and healthcare workers who have traveled from one place to the next have seen it. One of them said war doesn't compare to this. Maybe you should let one of them stay with you. They would bring a new perspective.
Few of us would be alive today without the ability to feel fear. People who lose their amygdalae don't function well in the world. It's useful and necessary, even though it's unpleasant. There have been legitimate reasons for people to be afraid. It can be a miserable experience to get a mild case of COVID-19.
The best way to reduce fear is to reduce danger. Maybe it would be over soon. One out of every 300 Americans will die from the virus.
You and Dr. Gandhi made a show about how to stop living in fear of carbon dioxide. I wonder how many of your people stopped fearing the virus. I don't know what happened to them and their families. Dr. Monica Gandhi wrote an excellent essay.
Your guests have credibility because they are your guests and you once had a reputation for being a vaccine advocate who didn't oppose anti-vaccine nonsense.
You don't have to be responsible for what your guests say. You are responsible for who is on your show and how you respond to them. As few of your guests work with sick children, they are shielded from the consequences of their words, as are you. Doctors who work with sick children are not likely to be on your program. Why is that happening?
It seems odd to me that the biggest advocate for vaccination on social media would enthusiastically amplify people who have spread misinformation. These are the sorts of ideas and people you skewered before the epidemic. I am sure there are many wonderful pediatricians who would be happy to be on your show and speak about what they are seeing in the hospital. I would learn a lot from listening to you talk to them. I have no idea what it is like to care for a child in the intensive care unit. I bet you don't know much.
Since you and your guests advocate for adult vaccinations, I know you will see this letter as friendly fire. You replied to me when I sent you a draft of the letter to make sure there were no glaring inaccuracies.
I don't understand why you would spend so much time working on this when there are people who are lying to the public.
By the time this letter is written, I hope it will be clear that I am writing this letter to counter anti-vaccine misinformation. Listen to the actual anti-vaxxers if you doubt me. They see your guests as allies. The journalist described Dr. Makary as thedarling of the anti-vaxxers. RFK Jr. has amplified two doctors. He can recognize doctors who are in agreement with his message. Anti-vaxxers support their guests on social media. Doctors who want to provide accurate information are not allowed to do so. Your guests don't really value discussion and debate. They need a safe space.
The fact that your guests are not anti-vaxxers makes them appear more credible. Their misinformation is more harmful than the anti-vaxxer balderdash. Since they are not saying that COVID-19 is a 5G hoax by Bill Gates, it is much harder for the average person to recognize their misinformation. The vaccine will likely kill as many children as the flu did last year, but parents should not be told that. People can easily spot anti-vaccine quacks. Your guests have credibility because they are your guests, and you once had a reputation as a vaccine-advocate who didn't tolerate anti-vaccine nonsense.
Instead of refuting this nonsense, you have legitimized and amplified those who spread it. Your guests will level with your listeners about the vaccine's flaws if they think they are getting nuance. Information and misinformation were heard a lot by your audience. There are different policies, such as mandates for children. People need to come to the table with the same facts. Your guests have made that impossible.
I believe your guests, with their impressive credentials, supreme confidence, and enormous media reach, bear as much responsibility for the abysmal vaccine rates as the actual anti-vaxxers. Only 18% of children ages 5-11 are fully vaccine free. Their parents think COVID-19 is less severe than the flu. They don't know that the vaccine can cause myocarditis.
One day, COVID-19 will be in the background. Your guests will be remembered for the sick children. Since sick children lead to closed schools and disrupted learning, this will be their legacy. Your guests say that schools must be open. virtue signalling is done by this empty mantra. They have opposed every method of limiting the spread of the virus in schools, and the results have been predictable for both children and their schools. Every article I have written has advocated for vaccinations. I wanted to say that schools should be open. I wanted schools to be open and safe.
The biggest advocate for vaccinations on social media should be sharing accurate information.
I am sure you know that sharing complete, accurate information about the vaccine and the virus will put you at odds with most of your guests. They don't want your audience to know that 1,131 children have died in the USA and that nearly 100,000 more have been hospitalized, some intubated. They don't want your audience to know that the vaccine can cause myocarditis and that it can cause myocarditis.
You haven't shown much openness to criticism or other opinions before. You ridiculed a doctor who predicted mass death, calling him a prophet of doom and fear. You think that your pro-vaccine activism doesn't shield you against criticism today. You portray yourself as a victim when someone disagrees with you. You make fun of your critics by saying the tribe is doing the pronoun dance. You think that everyone besides you is useless because they want to score points on social media by taking down one of their own that will actually get the job done of convincing people to vaccine.
Either you or your fans will dismiss the entire article as a take down. I promise I won't do that. People don't like being criticized. I don't. Our natural reaction is to see our critics as evil. They can show us our mistakes and make us better.
You are a gifted speaker with a large audience. Your fans can join the ZDoggMD fan shop or the ZPAC Supporter Tribe. There is no JoHo apparel for sale. You have provided valuable information on vaccines and children. You have to let people know that your child is vaccine free. You have convinced many parents to have their children vaccinations. I hope my articles made a difference. I have written about many other doctors here, but I have never written to them. They have never shown they care about being accurate. I think you do.
I hope you agree with me that the biggest advocate for vaccination on social media should strive to share accurate, thorough information about COVID-19, vaccines, and children. The consequences of misinformation are real. He said that his unvaccinated 15-year-old-daughter died of CoVID-19 this summer.
I don't want any other parent to go through what I went through, seeing my daughter healthy one day and then not seeing her again for a week and a half.
He regrets not getting the shot for his daughter. Her death could have been prevented with a vaccine. Hundreds of children will die this year. We should try to change that.
I don't have pronouns in my bio, but I say this all.
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