Prairie State Wire

A COVID vaccine is now widely available to children five and up across Illinois.

We’re certainly not about to tell parents whether they should vaccinate their kids against COVID. It’s for many of the same reasons that we think the State of Illinois also should not.

Parents and their doctors should make an informed choice on their own, being aware that expert opinion varies and that the science is rapidly evolving. That means advice from any single source, including the State of Illinois, should not be accepted as dogma.

The Pritzker Administration, however, unequivocally advises parents to vaccinate children. You can see that here in the linked video from the Illinois Department of Public Health. Search the subject and you will find many experts in agreement. But you will also find skeptics and firm opponents of vaccinating children, such as Yale epidemiologist Harvey Risch.

Maybe you will end up on the fence – concluding that the right answer is what two medical school experts recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “If you’re agonizing about whether to have your young child vaccinated against Covid-19, be reassured: The risk is extremely low either way.”

An important exception, they wrote, is kids who were already infected and have natural immunity, which they say is probably 50% of the childhood population. For them, “there’s no scientific basis for vaccination,” they wrote.

That’s one reason why we think unequivocal advice from the state to vaccinate kids is wrong. From the start, as we have often written, the entire subject of natural immunity has been suppressed by Illinois and many other government authorities. Whether a child has natural immunity should be relevant, at a minimum, to the decision about when a child should be vaccinated – whether it is sensible to wait and see what else is learned.

Another reason to look beyond the state’s unequivocal advice is that their record simply has not been good, to put it mildly. They’ve gotten too many things wrong, some of which we have documented in the columns listed below. And they rely almost exclusively on guidance from the Centers for Disease Control, for which the same can be said.

Finally, we are dealing with a moving target and that should make the state’s advice to immediately vaccinate kids suspect. The science is evolving and new drugs are appearing. New studies appear routinely, especially on the key question of whether vaccination materially reduces the risk of a child spreading the virus to others.

Good news is now appearing regularly on powerful, new treatments, as opposed to vaccinations for prevention. Earlier this month, for example, Pfizer claimed that a new, oral antiviral reduced the risk of hospitalization or death by 89% in a study of patients with mild or moderate COVID-19 symptoms. And a new study on Regeneron, which was already known to be a highly effective treatment, indicated the drug is 82% effective as a preventative.

As that science and those alternatives to vaccination evolve, so should conclusions about vaccinating children.

The government helped make COVID vaccines available, but it has no business giving cocksure advice about whether children should get them. A better role for the state would be to provide as much information and opinion as it can from all reasonably credible perspectives, thereby helping parents and doctors make informed decisions.

Be aware that these questions apparently aren’t going away soon because COVID will be with us indefinitely. For a great explanation why, watch this short video by one of the world’s top epidemiologists, Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University.

Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints