“To me, it’s unconscionable when a society uses its children as shields for adults.”
To me, it’s unconscionable when a society uses its children as shields for adults.
That sentence could serve as a perfect summation of my writing, had it been about the virus. Amazingly however, it was about the vaccine. It comes from an interview titled Dr. Scott Atlas on Vaccine Mandates for Children, Natural Immunity & Florida’s COVID Surge, which was posted on the right-wing misinformation site The Epoch Times. Dr. Atlas’ full quote was:
I am absolutely pro-vaccine. But to me, it’s unconscionable when a society uses its children as shields for adults. So we are going to inject our children with an experimental drug that they don’t have a significant benefit from to shield ourselves?
Dr. Atlas shared a similar message on social media. “I am a shield for my children, they are not to be used for shields as me“, he said, about the vaccine. “What kind of society uses children as human shields for adults?“, he asked, about the vaccine.
“All 29 critically ill case-patients, and both deaths occurred among unvaccinated case-patients.”
Though Dr. Atlas claims to be “absolutely pro-vaccine,” his statement is anti-vaccine to its core.
First, COVID vaccines were always used to directly protect children. Regulatory agencies and the American Academy of Pediatrics were crystal clear:
Vaccinating children will protect children’s health.
Two years ago, just after the COVID vaccine was approved for adolescents, I made a list of anti-vaccine “red flags”. One red flag was someone who:
Portrayed vaccination of young people primarily as a means to benefit adults by creating herd immunity.
I further explained:
Everyone is clear: young people should be vaccinated to protect themselves… it’s just a bonus that children might not lose their mom or dad because they’ve been vaccinated.
No one proposed vaccinating children primarily to benefit adults. However, some doctors who pushed for herd immunity through the mass infection of unvaccinated youth made this bogus claim to trick parents into thinking the vaccine would not benefit children and to absurdly portray themselves as the chief guardians of children’s health. Were these doctors to admit that the vaccine could directly benefit some children- which it has– it would force them to admit an uncomfortable truth: COVID can hurt some children, especially unvaccinated ones.
Second, COVID vaccines were given to adolescents only after hundreds of millions of adults had received them. They were studied in 6 pediatric randomized-controlled trials, which involved a total of nearly 25,000 children. They were not “experimental”, though this is a typical spooky anti-vaccine buzzword, along with “injected” and “drug”. Because Dr. Atlas can no longer be a cheerleader for herd immunity through mass infection, he seeks to emotionally manipulate parents into skipping the vaccine. Who wants to inject their child with an experimental drug? The images in the video were similarly crafted to prey on parents’ fears. Scientists need a hazmat suit to even handle the vaccine, apparently.
Third, the vaccine’s safety and efficacy have been closely monitored since its authorization. While it is not perfect, there are many studies from around the world that say things like this:
In hospitalized adolescents, “179 COVID-19 case-patients, six (3%) were vaccinated and 173 (97%) were unvaccinated. Overall, 77 (43%) case-patients were admitted to an intensive care unit, and 29 (16%) critically ill case-patients received life support during hospitalization, including invasive mechanical ventilation, vasoactive infusions, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation; two of these 29 critically ill patients (7%) died. All 77 case-patients admitted to the intensive care unit, all 29 critically ill case-patients, and both deaths occurred among unvaccinated case-patients…
Among hospitalized U.S. patients aged 12–18 years, vaccine effectiveness of 2 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against COVID-19 hospitalization during June–September 2021, was 93%.
Dr. Atlas, who will never share such information, was wrong. Some children do have a have a significant benefit from the vaccine, and this was always the main reason to vaccinate them. No American child has died from the vaccine, as far as I know. Yet this is the “danger” that Dr. Atlas warned parents about.
“It’s fantastic news that we have a lot of cases..they become immunity and they block the pathway of connectivity of contagiousness for older sicker people.”
Let’s return to my agree of agreement with Dr. Atlas: To me, it’s unconscionable when a society uses its children as shields for adults. How well does Dr. Atlas apply his own standard to SARS-CoV-2, a virus that can rarely lead to grave, even fatal, outcomes in children, unlike the vaccine?
I previously presented many quotations from Dr. Atlas that reveal his enthusiasm for using children as shields for adults. To pick one example, in an interview with Tucker Carlson from June 2020, Dr. Atlas said:
We expected more cases with more social mingling… But the fact is the overwhelming majority of these cases are in younger healthier people. These people do not have a significant problem. They do not have the serious complications. They do not die. And so it’s fantastic news that we have a lot of cases, but we don’t see deaths going up, and what that means is A: we’re are doing a better job of protecting the vulnerable, B: We’re in good shape here.
We like the fact that there’s a lot of cases in low- risk populations, because that’s exactly how we’re going to get herd immunity, population immunity, when low-risk people, with no significant problem handling this virus, which is basically 99% of people get this, they become immunity and they block the pathway of connectivity of contagiousness for older sicker people…Children have virtually zero risk of getting a serious complication, virtually a zero risk of dying…Children only rarely if ever transmit the disease.
Read that again: It’s fantastic news that we have a lot of cases…We like the fact that there’s a lot of cases in low- risk populations, because that’s exactly how we’re going to get herd immunity, population immunity…they become immunity and they block the pathway of connectivity of contagiousness for older sicker people…Children have virtually zero risk of getting a serious complication, virtually a zero risk of dying.
Around 2,000 children have since died of COVID, and many thousands more have been injured. These numbers would have been much higher had 73 million unvaccinated children contracted COVID simultaneously at the start of the pandemic as Dr. Atlas suggested. Conversely, much of this could have been prevented had unvaccinated children not been purposefully and repeatedly exposed to SARS-CoV-2 to theoretically protect more vulnerable adults.
To me, it’s unconscionable when a society uses its children as shields for adults.
Does Dr. Atlas disagree?