Harvard, Yale, and Stanford epidemiologists: don't vaccinate kids

Three leading epidemiologists sounded off in recent weeks about the recklessness of vaccinating healthy kids against covid, as highlighted in Tom Woods' newsletter this week.

Harvey Risch, a professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and the Yale School of Medicine with over 40,000 scholarly citations to his name, had this to say about it:

As far as I can tell, it's a top-down structure, and most doctors do not get their information by going back and reading the original studies and making up their own minds. They get fed the information from pharma reps or from what they're told from societies. The conflicts are legion. So it's no surprise that most doctors don't pay attention and think what they're told...

If the child has chronic conditions that make their risk appreciable, then there is a reason that they should be considered for vaccination. Other than that, if it were my child, I would homeschool them. Honestly, I would organize with other parents to take them out of the school and create a homeschooling environment. There is no choice. Your child's life is on the line.

It's not a high risk. Vaccination is not a high risk that's going to kill every child by doing so. However, it's enough of a risk that on the average the benefit is higher for homeschooling than it is for vaccination and being in school.

Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, another storied epidemiologist with 27,000 scholarly citations, said this:

I don't think children should be vaccinated for COVID. I'm a huge fan of vaccinating children for measles, for mumps, for polio, for rotavirus, and many other diseases. That's critical. But COVID is not a huge threat to children...

They can be infected, just like they can get the common cold, but they're not a big threat. They don't die from this, except in very rare circumstances. So if you want to talk about protecting children or keeping children safe, I think we can talk about traffic accidents, for example, which they are really at some risk... And there are other things that we should make sure [of] to keep children safe. But COVID is not a big risk factor for children...

So this is not a risky disease for children...

As was pointed out in the FDA panel's public hearing about vaccines for kids, they face significantly greater risk from suicide, or accidents like drowning.

Earlier in the summer, Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya had chimed in with Kulldorff, calling the push to vaccinate kids "ill-advised."

The ill-advised push to vaccinate the young

Every dose given to a low-risk young adult in the United States means one fewer dose available for high-risk older people in Brazil, Congo, India or Mexico

The HillMartin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya, Opinion Contributors

Bhattacharya and Kulldorff go on to state that all medical interventions should be subject to a cost-benefit analysis that simply fails the test for children.

For younger adults and children, it is a different story, as their mortality risk is extremely low. Even a slight risk of a serious vaccine adverse reaction could tip the benefit-risk calculation, making the vaccine more harmful than beneficial. We have already observed rare problems with blood clots (J&J vaccine) and myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle, Pfizer and Moderna) in younger people, and additional equally serious issues might still be found.

Under such uncertainty, vaccine mandates are unethical. University presidents or business leaders should not mandate a medical intervention that could have dire consequences for the health of even a few of the people in their charge.