at best, COVID-19 is roughly as deadly to children as measles was before the vaccine (and that’s even with a percentage of the population ages 0-19 having been vaccinated). More likely, COVID-19 is considerably more deadly to children than measles was in the 1950s, before the vaccine was developed.
Yet back then doctors and scientists considered measles, its status as a “normal childhood illness” notwithstanding, to be a deadly threat that warranted a vaccine—and rightly so! We shouldn’t tolerate 500 children dying every year and something like 1-3 per 1,000 suffering severe neurological sequelae, and in the 1960s we didn’t. The measles vaccine resulted in a dramatic decline in the number of cases of measles per year. In contrast, today a distressing number of physicians just shrug their shoulders metaphorically at an equal or higher level of carnage due to an infectious disease, and trot out the same old antivax arguments used for measles based on COVID-19 supposedly being “not a threat” to children in order to argue against pandemic mitigations in schools or vaccine mandates.
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If you use arguments against vaccinating children against COVID-19 that are in form identical to the arguments that antivaxxers used to use before the pandemic to argue against vaccinating children against measles, pertussis, and the like, namely that the disease isn’t a threat to the children, while ignoring that the disease kills hundreds of children a year, what should I call you? You’ve lost the right to get all indignant if I call you an antivaxxer. If the name fits…
COVID-19 is a leading cause of death among children, but that doesn’t stop some of my colleagues from arguing against vaccinating them (Science-Based Medicine, Feb 6, 2023)
Which other drugs? Perhaps I missed the exchange here listing the drugs.