How will the government and media convince parents to give children a non-FDA-approved Covid vaccine?

by philg

Now that nearly all U.S. adults are on their way to vaccination (see Fact-checking Donald Trump’s predictions regarding COVID vaccine availability), it is time to get Americans to accept the injection of an “investigational” (non-FDA-approved; see We love our children so much we will give them an investigational vaccine and Facebook fact check) vaccine for their children.

I know a remarkable number of young people who are major Mask and Shutdown Karens and who are generally afraid to leave their apartments due to expressed personal fears of contracting coronavirus. I always ask these folks “Do you personally know anyone who has been hospitalized for COVID-19?” and the answer is almost always “no.” Nor do they know anyone who claims to be suffering from “Long COVID”. In other words, if they weren’t exposed to government and media stories about COVID they wouldn’t know that it existed or was hazardous to anyone their age.

Before people here in Maskachusetts were going to hear the news that public schools would remain shut, the state removed fatality-by-age-group data from the Covid dashboard. Thus, the general public was unable to learn that nobody under age 20 in MA had ever died from COVID-19. I’m wondering if there will now be a ramp-up of stories about children testing positive, being harmed, etc. Here’s a recent Boston Globe story:

Most people wouldn’t read beyond the headline to see a hint as to what might be behind the increase in “cases” (positive PCR tests), i.e., that many Massachusetts schools recently initiated a pooled testing program (test a pool every week, wait for result, then start testing individuals if the result for the pool is positive; due to the days of lag time, “useless” was the rating from a friend who is an expert in public health informatics).

From government-funded media, “Michigan Sees Surge In COVID-19 Among Children” (NPR):

There’s an alarming spike in COVID-19 cases among children in Michigan.

Dr. Bishara Freij is chief of pediatric infectious disease at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., which is just north of Detroit, and he joins us now.

FREIJ: Children do much better than adults in terms of infection. So their infections are much less severe, and far fewer of them get hospitalized. And certainly, death is pretty uncommon.

FREIJ: … The problem is it’s not predictable who’s going to do OK and who won’t. So I can tell you that most of the kids that have been really sick that we’ve taken care of had been previously well children. You know, they were not the chronically ill patients who happened to get COVID on top of their other problems. And so when we look at them, there’s no way to predict which child is going to have a bad disease. The odds are low, but you cannot say, my child is going to escape because that child is healthy.

Only the vaccinated will be spared!

Can the scientists help? “Vaccinating Children against Covid-19 — The Lessons of Measles” (New England Journal of Medicine, February 18, 2021):

Protecting children against SARS-CoV-2 infection is both an ethical obligation and a practical necessity. We need data from pediatric trials to reassure parents about the safety and wisdom of this approach. We must prepare for disinformation campaigns that prey on parental fears and target communities made vulnerable through histories of medical neglect, health disparities, and racism. … Dare we imagine a campaign that would actually thank children and parents for helping to protect others, as the rubella campaign did, perhaps suggesting that they proudly display their SARS Stars or Corona Diplomas?

(From the same journal: an editorial saying to stop classifying babies as boys/girls on birth certificates.)

I would love to see the “SARS Star” to be affixed to the clothing of a vaccinated person. As a starting point, here’s an idea from a museum:

What word should go in the center, though?

26 thoughts on “How will the government and media convince parents to give children a non-FDA-approved Covid vaccine?”

  1. If nothing else would, this suggestion convinces me that You, Philip, are a foolish menace.

    • Bernie: let’s hope that one day the Facebook content police can control the entire Internet so that misinformation regarding COVID-19 is not distributed.

    • I think Phil is great! Obama always said if you like reading Philip’s blog you can keep reading Philip’s blog. If you don’t like it you don’t need to read!

    • There’s a rule of thumb which says that meaningful conversation between people with difference in IQ of 40 or more points is not possible. You, Bernie, just confirmed the rule.

  2. They have already changed the rules at school for vaccinated kids. IE allowed to leave the state during vacation. Can return to school earlier if there is an ‘exposure.’ It is evil.

  3. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt. (In conjunction with social pressure)
    Also: I’m long covid, it sucks, don’t do it. (Although I agree that children will be fine and it all must be balanced against society functioning)

  4. On pooled testing for schoolchildren in MA: Before this began, one morning a few months ago I was listening to my favorite NPR station, WAMC in Great Barrington, MA (President and CEO: Dr. Alan Chartock). I knew that pooled testing was coming because they did a segment on it, featuring a guest from one of the states already applying it. The commentary was fascinating-as-usual: complete approval, very little digging into what “pooled testing” meant, except that it was “quicker.” The two commentators agreed that it was a great idea, and there was very little talk about how many true positive students it had identified until the last 30 seconds of the segment: “A few.”

    How many is “a few?” We’ll never know, because the host didn’t press for numbers. Instead, she ended the segment by teeing up: “And thanks to this testing we can see why these school districts need more resources to implement more of these programs as quickly as possible.”

    “Oh, absolutely! That’s exactly what we need, everywhere!”
    “Well, thank you soooo much for coming on the show today [genderfemale sounding name] it’s been wonderful to have you.”
    “Thank you soooo much. I really appreciate it!”

    It was just no numbers, no basis for comparison, no hard questions, no cost/benefit, absolutely nothing but mutual positive regard and support oozing from every pore. How can anyone know what the cost/benefits of these ideas are when the media source of choice among this country’s academic elite never even ask, and don’t care?

  5. In California, there’s nothing left for the government and media to do, this work is already complete. Parents are driving vaccination of their own children with fear, and of the children of others this with “no sleepovers with unvaccinated friends”, “you can’t babysit my child unless vaccinated”, etc. Related, it is forbidden socially to ask “do you ever wonder why Florida and California have the same death rates due to Covid even though these states have handled Covid very differently?”.

    I’ll also note anecdotally that two doctors I have asked about this had two common opinions:

    – It is a moral obligation for children to protect society by getting vaccinated.
    – Covid is very dangerous (however if is also forbitten to mention that Covid is 8700 times more likely to cause death for an 85 years old than for 5-17 years old, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-age.html).

    • If you adjust for the fact that Florida has a much higher percentage of population over 65 (and therefore Covid-vulnerable), California actually has a much higher Covid death rate than Florida.

    • Philip raised a great point about density and urbanization. What you really want to look at is adjusted-by-closeby-density density (for each inhabitant, how many more are close by?). This differentiates between the trivial degenerate cases of two 1M pop, 10000sqm states where the first has all the pop in a city and the second has it spread evenly around.

    • Intra-city density matters too. Some cities consist of dense high-rises with common ventilation, other of dense townhouses and row houses, others of stand alone houses with decent land plots that contain driveways, garages and decent size backyards…

    • Jim,
      California governor opening – up California and relaxing mask mandate under threat to be removed from office worked? It is not all rosy, real infection rate is 1.2% based on those tested positively today. But California corona-math is “fuzzy”, G. W Bush deserves Fields medal for his observation. 1,445 new cases today in CA while testing positively is 1.2% based 156,757 tested today. 1.2% out of 156,757 is greater then 2,000. https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/ I think it is recreational marijuana being legal in CA thing.

    • Jim: “California must be doing something right.” (if coronaplague numbers are low) implies “California must have done something wrong” in the past (because coronaplague numbers were high), no? Yet California’s policies (masks+shutdown) haven’t changed.

    • Phil…. it doesn’t imply anything. It’s simply reporting that at this point in time California has the lowest case rate in the nation.

      By the way, California’s mask and shut down policies have changed significantly and continue to evolve.

    • Jim… if you knew anything about how CA politics works, you’d also know that the governments stats out of CA are about as trustworthy as from China.

    • averros… I read somewhere that meaningful conversation between people with difference in IQ of 40 or more points is not possible.

      You have reconfirmed that.

    • Jim.. oh, go and insert your favorite object in your favotite orifice. I don’t argue with idiots.

  6. Philip: AFAIK, the FDA is dragging its feet on full approval for no good reason (the third stage trials were finished in Q4 2020, which is the usual approval point). An alternative theory is that full approval would mean the US federal (and other) government would have to stop paying for the vaccines (some USC paragraph says so), and the US legislators can’t be expected to fix that in the 15 full months since the Covid emergency started.

    I’m having a hard time entertaining this, as I can’t see what could stop the government from paying for things it wants to pay for.

    • They are not stupid. They want to retain the option of saying ‘well you did take an experimental drug due to peer pressure’ when all cause mortality among the vaccinated goes through the roof.
      Additional thought: Does the super duper double immunity from harm the manufacturers have get lowered if there is proper approval?

    • Could it be…. that the actual data from the Phase 3 clinical trials show that the vaccines are either useless or dangerous. Or both.

      The pre-COVID attempts of getting coronavirus vaccines aporoved never went beyond Phase 2 – for very good reasons.

    • OC…the FDA will not give full approval until they know how long the vaccine will be effective, which they hope is one to two years.

      This is discussed on their site.

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