Any employee responsible for masking 2 year olds or adding COVID19 vaccines to the pediatric schedule should be fired.
In November 2023, Dr. Vinay Prasad, an anti-vaccine adult oncologist who has spread copious misinformation about pediatric COVID despite never treating a child sick with it, said CDC employees should be purged en masse for trying to prevent COVID in children. He wrote:
In order to regain trust, the CDC needs to be reorganized. First, any employee responsible for masking 2 year olds or adding COVID19 vaccines to the pediatric schedule should be fired…The CDC is failing every day; only drastic action can overcome the public doubt they have created by their own incompetence.
In a pandemic where over 1.1 million Americans died, including around 2,000 children, Dr. Prasad reserves his scorn and calls for “drastic action”, not for those who spewed fatal anti-vaccine disinformation, but rather for those who tried to limit pediatric COVID. He felt these CDC employees deserved a professional death sentence, the most extreme canceling possible.
Society faces a risk even more toxic and deadly than Covid-19: that the conduct of science becomes indistinguishable from politics.
Being fired is indeed a “drastic action,” much worse than having a single speech canceled, though predictably Dr. Prasad expressed outrage and self-pity that this happened to him- Why Was My Talk at a Medical Conference Canceled?. He feels that doctors who spread misinformation to further their goal of infecting unvaccinated children deserve a safe space where they are shielded from the slightest social opprobrium.
Indeed anti-vaccine doctors sought to shame their critics into silence by treating nearly all attempts to limit their misinformation as a full-on assault on the principle of open, civil discourse, which they claimed was more consequential than COVID itself. In April 2020, for example, along with another defender of misinformation, Dr. Jeffrey Flier, Dr. Prasad wrote a defense of Dr. John Ioannidis titled Scientists Who Express Different Views on Covid-19 Should be Heard, Not Demonized. It said:
When major decisions must be made amid high scientific uncertainty, as is the case with Covid-19, we can’t afford to silence or demonize professional colleagues with heterodox views. Even worse, we can’t allow questions of science, medicine, and public health to become captives of tribalized politics. Today, more than ever, we need vigorous academic debate…
Society faces a risk even more toxic and deadly than Covid-19: that the conduct of science becomes indistinguishable from politics.
Yet today, not only does Dr. Prasad routinely call people “idiots”, “STUPID“, a “bunch of fools” and “total morons“, he also says CDC employees who tried to protect children in ways he did not approve of, should lose their career and income.
Good. It’s a useless vaccine for kids.
Dr. Prasad’s retribution fantasy of mass firings at the CDC was not an isolated incident. I was reminded of it I saw this recent social media exchange:
While I am skeptical this “Swedish couple” thing actually happened, Dr. Prasad was happy to take it at face value. A victim of audience capture who must always be “controversial” to pander to his paid subscribers, Dr. Prasad said it was “good” that these parents, who only “asked for COVID vaccine for the child“, were reported to Child Protective Services (CPS).
What was good about it, exactly?
CPS gets involved when children are abused or neglected. Does Dr. Prasad feel this potentially-vaccinated child was in grave danger? Moreover, CPS can take “drastic action” to keep children safe. Does Dr. Prasad feel these parents should be “fired” too?
COVID-19 vaccine is strongly effective for children and adolescents during delta and omicron.
Since I can’t let anti-vaccine misinformation slide, I’ll add that Dr. Prasad was right about just one thing, pediatric vaccination rates are low. Pro-infection doctors were successful in infecting tens of millions of unvaccinated children, with tragic consequences for some of them.
However, Dr. Prasad was wrong about everything else. Though I’ve never seen him tell this to his readers, there were 6 pediatric randomized-controlled trials involving nearly 25,000 children. One of them found “the observed vaccine efficacy was 100%.” Not bad.
Unsurprisingly, dozens of observational studies from around the world have since shown the same thing, a vaccine that limits SARS-CoV-2 infections also limits rare but grave harms from SARS-CoV-2. When Dr. Prasad, who judges studies by their results not their methods, casually dismisses all of them as “flawed”, what he really means is, “Since I relentlessly encouraged unvaccinated children to get COVID, I don’t want these studies to be true.”
Read this study here.
Finally, although COVID killed and injured more American children than every other vaccine-preventable disease combined over the past 4-years, the COVID vaccine is not in competition with other vaccines. Quite the opposite actually. Countries that encouraged unvaccinated children to repeatedly contract COVID, as Dr. Prasad advocated, are experiencing “broader vaccine hesitancy” than the U.S. Is the CDC to blame for measles in the UK because they “pushed” the pediatric COVID vaccine?
We must be careful not to create a roadmap to this future with our policy choices today, perhaps we already have.
Beyond this, our readers may remember Dr. Prasad’s delusional dystopian fanfiction where he likened measures to stop people from dying of COVID to Nazi totalitarianism. In his article, How Democracy Ends, he concluded:
We must be careful not to create a roadmap to this future with our policy choices today, perhaps we already have.
Yet today, when led to believe that parents faced potentially devastating state sanction only because they asked for a COVID vaccine for their child, Dr. Prasad said this was:
Good.
And thus it becomes clear, whether it was CDC employees or parents, trying to limit pediatric COVID was literally the pandemic’s worst sin for pro-infection doctors, warranting severe punishment. This is how desperately they wanted them infected.