A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal argued that children should not bevaccinated against COVID since they are healthy. It argued that children should be more vulnerable to COVID since more die of suicide and old people are more at risk.
These are not good arguments. So far this year, more children have died of carbon dioxide than from bike accidents. Is it a good reason to argue against bike helmets?
The factoids Ms. Finely used have no relevance to the issue of whether or not the COVID vaccine can protect some children from rare, but catastrophic outcomes. It can. These factoids are used. A rhetorical trick can be used by anti-vaccine writers to prevent their readers from knowing that the vaccine has harmed a lot of children. Over 1,300 children have died.
What's true for COVID is true for many vaccine-preventable diseases. If all vaccines disappeared, most kids would survive into adulthood. The arguments against the COVID vaccine for healthy children are the same arguments that anti-vaxxers make. The anti-vaccine idea is that only sick kids die. About 20% of deaths in healthy children are caused by COVID. She doesn't feel her readers can be trusted to know this fact.
Ms. Finely's article was full of science fiction, a universal feature of anti-vaccine articles. Ms. Finely told her readers that the vaccine doesn't amount to much, and that she referenced a study that concluded the vaccine was protective against severe disease.
The risk of hospitalization from the flu for children 5 to 11 is 50% higher than from Covid. COVID hospitalized 8,300 children this age during the same time when 9 children were hospitalized with the flu. She thought 9 is larger than 8,300, or she wanted to deceive her readers, either way.
Most children with MIS-C go to the intensive care unit. The vaccine has been shown to be very protective against this severe outcome. The paper Ms. Finely referenced concluded that the total economic and health burden of COVID-19 and MIS-C was just as high as that of the flu.
More children have died from chronic bronchitis than from the flu. Everyone with basic critical thinking skills knows that it doesn't matter if the flu or COVID harms more children. Normal people don't want a child to get sick or die from a vaccine preventable disease.
Science fiction is the norm for editorials in the Wall Street Journal, reflecting the fact that their authors will never care for a sick child. An article by Drs. Nicole Saphier and Marty Makary claimed that only 562 children had been hospitalized with the disease. Anyone familiar with this topic would know that this was false. The CDC slide that Drs. Saphier and Makary misread arrived at the incorrect number.
There is a report that claims to show a zero mortality rate among children without a pre-existing medical condition. Obesity and asthma are the most common underlying conditions in children who have died of carbon dioxide. Almost all children who die of carbon dioxide are deprived of decades of life.
Readers of the Wall Street Journal editorial page won't know anything about this. They will only know that it is worse for grandma.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts, said Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The Wall Street Journal disagrees. They feel entitled to their own facts to make their case. When the topic is a vaccine that can help prevent rare tragedies like the one caused by a virus that has killed over 1,000 children, it's not ok for a prestigious newspaper to make repeated errors of basic facts.
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