My NEW op-ed is out in @usnews!
Mandating 12-18 year old kids get 2 doses of COVID19 vaccine & throwing them out of school if they don't is one of the most regressive, dangerous, and misguided policies in recent years, and I condemn it
1. How can LA mandate 2 doses for boys aged 12 to 22 when our peer nations do not support 2 doses, given risk of myocarditis?
Same science
Same data
Mandate 2 vs. optional 1?
You can't use power of mandate for science that is not settled
2. The current policies are so restrictive that you can't even space the doses out to 12 weeks, as Norway is attempting to lower risk of myocarditis.
Why is there no flexibility in these policies?
3. The former FDA commissioner and Board member of Pfizer, Scott Gottlieb, urges that parents should have some say in when and how to vaccinate kids
What about kids s/p covid w/ natural immunity?
Yet these policies preclude it!
4. Throwing kids out of school for not complying
will mean throwing some of the poorest kids in USA out
After society failed these children by WRONGLY depriving them of a year of school
Shame on us...
Punishing kids in LA is not solution to adult vaccine hesitancy elsewhere
5. This is not like other vaccines
Kids 12 to 15 is under auspices of EUA only
Peer nations are making different choices
Information on safety changes by the day
This is not like other mandates
6. Americans have repeatedly taken out their rage and frustration on children with prolonged school closure, and now this.
When the dust settles our country & this generation is going to be so broken from these actions.
I pray they forgive us; we failed them.
7. I am pro vaccination, and have personally Rx countless vaccines (they are used in post transplant setting)
Also Listen to my 1 hour defense of vaccination
But let me be clear, this policy risks serious harm to these kids.
8. I have been a progressive my entire adult life; I believe government can be a powerful force of good if policies & incentives are constructed correctly. I believe society must help the least well off.
The theme of my 2 books.
Sadly, I no longer recognize many progressives.
9. Now this gentleman ππ
Anthony LaMesa is a must follow on schools
He consistently understands what progressive policy means, and what putting kids first means
... many of these people who are losing their jobs right now risk their own personal safety to work in the hospital before there was a vaccine. When you needed them.
These people don't disappear from America either, and their fate is tied to all our fate.
Pressuring people to get vaccinated will increase vaccination rate some fraction and that will provide some marginal extra protection to people who've already chosen to be vaccinated, but it will also lead to firings and that will provide negative countervailing results..
The CDC director, a political appointee, siding with the President, & his pre-ordained plan, against the advice of the ACIP advisors, with 0 RCTs measuring clinical outcomes & no idea of adverse events is not "doing one's job" it is politics > science, precisely what we feared π§΅
The process that led up to Pfizer booster is someday going to be seen as what many dreaded during the Trump administration.
The White House decided during the week of Sept 20, boosters will be made available, and all gears of drug regulation made it happen
Consider the 24 year old male health care aid living in Seattle who received 2 doses of Pfizer vax, and is now granted a path to take dose 3.
Can any medical expert answer 2 questions:
Do the benefits exceed the harms to this individual?
Is he a 'safer' employee?
Asymptomatic testing of highly vaccinated young populations (e.g college) serves no purpose. 1. No one will follow similar restrictions off campus (aka pointless) 2. These kids are going to get SarsCOV 2 eventually (endemic) 3. It will disrupt their life 4. Policies...
In response make no sense
Masking outdoors 5. Most of the regions doing this are not the regions suffering from delta wave. In fact the place suffering from delta wave won't do it, and the places with high vaccination will do it.
6 mostly signaling
7. College kids protested Vietnam b/c they understood how pointless it was; They have not yet protested this b/c they have been deceived into thinking it helps. Sad times.
This NEJM booster paper DOES NOT justify mass population boosting
4 issues 1. People who get boosters and those who do not are TOTALLY different people. Look at table 1.
This is confounding by indication/ diff. people/ diff behavior
2. The effect size for severe disease is RR 20!
Too good to be true.
An RCT will be fast to exclude a benefit of this size (its just resid. confounding)
3. The benefit on any disease is smaller than on severe disease, which makes less sense from an Ab point of view (should be opposite), and more from the type of people getting booster point of view.