Children under 5 years old can finally get vaccinated against COVID-19. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommends it, as of this month. This is good news, I believe.
The bad news is that this good news reveals how many parents have spent more than two years hiding their little children from a virus that never posed a grave threat to them.
Media outlets fostered unwarranted fear in parents, so those outlets bare the blame for the harm caused to parents and children from two years of isolation.
“Children under five are still not eligible for COVID-19 vaccines— leaving them vulnerable as the Omicron variant drives a surge in pediatric hospitalizations,” wrote National Geographic in January.
Leana Wen, a doctor, was one of many celebrity physicians to fan the flames of fear with sentiments like this line in an op-ed a couple of weeks ago: “Throughout the pandemic, my concern about COVID-19 has not been for me and my husband, but for our children. … Our son, now almost 5 years old, had to stop preschool when the coronavirus first hit. Even after school resumed, we kept him out of many childhood activities and only recently resumed extracurriculars and indoor playdates.”
But unvaccinated children under 5 were less vulnerable than vaccinated adults, and we have long had data establishing that very clearly.
Here’s how Emily Oster put it in the Atlantic: “Being a child aged 5 to 17 is 99.9 percent protective against the risk of death and 98 percent protective against hospitalization. For children 0 to 4, these numbers are 99.9 percent (death) and 96 percent (hospitalization).”
Here’s how David Wallace-Wells put it: “According to one, much-cited paper, the infection fatality rate for those aged 5 to 9 is less than 0.001 percent. It suggests that a child of that age, even sick, faces roughly one-ten-thousandth the mortality risk of an 85-year-old.”
The little kids were always safe.
If you read closely, most of the “parents of kids under five are left behind” stories, the real suffering they had wasn’t the threat of the virus but the threat of quarantine if a child has the sniffles — or the self-imposed suffering by those parents who fell for the media fearmongering and kept their little kids isolated because the tots were unvaxxed.
https://twitter.com/mkhammer/status/1537228001380667392
The messaging that caused this behavior a grave error by our public health authorities and our media. It harmed children and their families.
