The county executive of Montgomery County, Maryland, apparently believes that fighting COVID requires banning my five-year-old from the local nature center.
Next week, the county council will vote on a vaccine passport bill proposed by County Executive Marc Elrich. The law will, effective in March, apply to everyone 5 years old and older. It won’t apply in “senior centers,” but it will apply in museums, indoor botanical gardens, restaurants, bowling alleys, ice cream places, bakeries, and libraries.
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This is not a law carefully crafted to keep public places safe from COVID. I don’t know what Elrich’s motive is. Perhaps he’s trying to force out of the county everyone who is not part of his political tribe. Perhaps he feels political pressure to impose as many burdens upon parents as possible ahead of his March primary.
Elrich knows that in the omicron phase of this pandemic, vaccination serves mostly to protect the vaccinated against severe illness, not to prevent the spread. He knows this because he knows that in our highly vaccinated county — the most vaccinated in America by some counts — thousands of people are testing positive every day, but the hospitalization wave has been muted. In fact, the vaxxed and boosted Elrich himself got COVID last week!
If the vaccines are not significantly stopping the spread, what is the public health justification for forcing people to get the vaccines? People should get vaccinated in order to protect themselves from the risk of hospitalization or death. But for the government to coerce people into getting vaccinated, the burden is higher than “this is good for your health.”
Also, the health case for vaccinating 5-year-olds is not clear. Young children are incredibly unlikely to get serious cases of COVID. Many 5-year-olds have other conditions that make it very important for them to get COVID vaccines, so I’m glad they are available. But for many 5-year-olds, especially previously infected 5-year-olds, the case for vaccinating them simply isn’t there. In the United Kingdom, for instance, vaccines are approved only for high-risk young children.
An expert testifying before the FDA put it this way: “It just seems to me that in some ways we’re vaccinating children to protect the adults, and it should be the other way around … I do believe that children at highest risk do need to be vaccinated. But vaccinating all of the children to achieve that just seems a bit much for me.”
The FDA’s advisory committee considered it a close call whether to recommend the vaccine for young children. How can a close call so quickly become an iron-clad requirement?
What’s more, the botanical gardens, nature centers, and libraries all require masks in Montgomery County. A masked 5-year-old who recovered from COVID a few weeks ago poses exactly zero threat to spread the virus to a passing stranger at the botanical gardens. Yet, if Elrich has his way, that child will be banned from much of the county’s public life.
