"PR agents" or Journalists - Corruption Kills Science
Healthy Children Don’t Need Covid Vaccines Florida is right. Especially for kids under 12, the risks are trivial. And most have natural antibodies. Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2022.
The Sunshine State is bucking the public-health consensus again. “The Florida Department of Health is going to be the first state to officially recommend against the Covid-19 vaccines for healthy children,” Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced March 7.
Cue the outrage. The American Academy of Pediatrics called the recommendation “irresponsible.” The Infectious Diseases Society of America accused Dr. Ladapo of putting “politics over the health and safety of children.” White House press secretary Jen Psaki jabbed: “It’s deeply disturbing that there are politicians peddling conspiracy theories out there and casting doubt on vaccinations.”
Dr. Ladapo is doing no such thing. He is merely acknowledging the abundant scientific evidence that Covid-19 poses a negligible risk to healthy children, which makes it impossible to know if the benefit of vaccination outweighs the risk…
The WSJ goes on:
Vaccine efficacy against infection, meanwhile, turned negative during the Omicron surge a month after kids were inoculated (minus 10%) and declined even more after six weeks (minus 41%). This means vaccinated children were significantly more likely to catch Covid than the unvaccinated…
The public-health consensus has been wrong time and again during the pandemic. When it comes to vaccinating children, especially the youngest, Dr. Ladapo is right.
My caveat with the editorial is that the author has various opinions about the science that frankly are wrong. However, to get into that would be nitpicking.
The article’s main conclusions are correct in my opinion. There is no need to vaccinate healthy children, and the Pfizer vaccine is associated with considerable risk for children - particularly boys.
I also wish to thank the WSJ for publishing this editorial, it is a step in the right direction.
Why science reporters don’t report fairly on the origins of Covid-19. City Journal. By Nicholas Wade March 20, 2022
This long article cogently explains why the recent “news” articles regarding the origin of the virus (which also happen to denounce that gain-of-function theories) are baseless and wrong. It is worth the read - the author’s analysis is compelling. Of note, the sources for these new pre-prints touting a natural origin for the virus are tainted with conflict of interest issues, and the sources that backup these claims are not innocent parties in the gain-of-function research. Yes, this includes Drs. Fauci and Collins, as well as other less “high profile” researchers. The article concludes with the following statement:
If the Covid virus should be found to have indeed escaped from a lab in Wuhan, a tidal wave of public rage may shake the temple of science to its foundations. It’s in reflection of their sources’ interests—though political polarization is also involved—that science writers jump on any evidence favoring natural emergence and ignore everything that points toward a lab leak.
Science writers need to decide whether their duty lies to their readers or to their sources. One choice makes them real journalists, the other just unaccredited PR agents for the scientific community.