Should We Let Children Catch Omicron?
As readers of SBM know, Dr. Vinay Prasad has advocated for the mass infection of unvaccinated children to theoretically shield more vulnerable adults. He’s also treated rare, usually mild, vaccine side effects, even mere abnormal lab values in kids who feel fine, with more gravitas than literal death from COVID.
Abnormal lab values are treated with more gravitas than dead children
Even when the Delta wave was generating headlines such as Every Day, Hundreds of Kids Are Getting Hospitalized With Covid-19, Dr. Prasad casually dismissed the COVID’s impact on children. Watch the video below and compare how he discussed children hospitalized with COVID versus how he discussed “subclinical myocarditis”. Actual harms were brushed off, while theoretical harms were treated very seriously. There was never a moment when Dr. Prasad seriously acknowledged that COVID hurt some children. In fact, he published his pro-infection essay, Should We Let Children Catch Omicron? in February 2022, after the Omicron variant ripped through the pediatric population, generating headlines such as A Fifth of All US Child Covid Deaths Occurred During Omicron Surge.
Dr. Prasad claims that he arrives at his conclusions because he follows the evidence, data, and the science.
If the epidemic is abating
However, many people who claim to follow the evidence, data, and the science had their minds made up about the COVID vaccine before there was a COVID vaccine. According to one study:
Major anti-vaccine groups were sowing seeds of doubt on Facebook weeks before the US government launched its vaccine development program ‘Operation Warp Speed’. Early anti-vaccine misinformation campaigns outpaced public health messaging and hampered the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines.
Like them, Dr. Prasad began his crusade against the pediatric COVID vaccine before there was a pediatric COVID vaccine. The data from the randomized-controlled trial (RCT) in adolescents was released in March 2021 via a company press release. This study was published in the NEJM in May 2021, and all 16 COVID cases occurred in the placebo group.
Yet, before this data was available, Dr. Prasad had strong thoughts on the matter. He laid out his thoughts in a Twitter thread from January 2021. He said:
Let me be perfectly clear: children DO NOT NEED a sars-cov-2 vaccine before they are permitted to return to normal activities, such as school and visiting loved ones. Any claims to the contrary are demoralizing and counter to common sense and medicine…
The virus meanwhile, is *thank god* not that bad for most healthy kids, on par with seasonal influenza. Evern the rate of mail-inflammatory syndrome is low.–although you wouldn’t know that from the breathless news coverage and tweets.
Third, who even says the vaccine will offer a favorable risk benefit profile in kids? If the vaccine offers AEs similar to pfizer and moderna dose 2 in adults, I think it will be a huge debate if childhood vaccination is indicated.
If the epidemic is abating, how can you justify giving 100 kids those AEs so that perhaps 1 or 2 or even 3 will be spared a case of Covid that might be as mild as the AEs themselves.
One has to think of the cumulative days a kid is resting in bed, vaccination might outweigh the benefits in low age. Moreover, as death is feelingly rare in kids, as is MISC, are we going to power the trials for this outcome. I doubt we will say anything conclusive…
One adults, particularly older adults are vaccinated, and if *god willing* there is not vaccine escape, covid19 is over. We are going back to normal.
Dr. Prasda then formalized his thoughts in an essay the next month titled Kids Don’t Need Covid-19 Vaccines to Return to School. He argued that children were less likely to get COVID. He said:
Kids are less likely to acquire SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, than adults.
Dr. Prasad spread fake statistics- the vaccine might save one life for every 1 million kids who get it– and even though COVID had killed over 200 children by that point in the pandemic and the flu just one child, Dr. Prasad said:
For them it is a respiratory pathogen with a rate of harm that is comparable to other, annual respiratory pathogens like influenza.
Though Dr. Prasad refused to inform his readers about COVID’s non-fatal harms to children, he wasn’t so nonchalant about the vaccine. He started planting seeds of doubt about its value, speculating it would cause “severe headaches requiring analgesics and interfering with daily living” and a fever lasting “for more than a day.” Even at this early date, Dr. Prasad was treating vaccine side effects as more concerning than death from COVID.
In a podcast with Dr. Zubin Damania (ZDoggMD) from that month, Dr. Prasad rightly acknowledged that there was no data about the pediatric COVID vaccine. However, this lack of data didn’t stop him from claiming the vaccine would cause more harm than good. He repeated his false claim that COVID only killed 1 in a million children and expressed great concern about post-vaccination fevers and muscle aches. While COVID’s non-fatal harms were again neglected, Dr. Prasad felt parents should take unpleasant, though mundane vaccine side-effects very seriously.
Omicron and Children: Pediatric Hospitals in Parts of U.S. Filling Up Fast
Though Dr. Prasad thought that vaccinating adults would protect children and obviate the need to vaccinate them in the spring of 2021, things didn’t turn out that way. Yet, he hasn’t altered his opinions a bit. Even though babies aren’t born with natural immunity, Dr. Prasad remains as committed as ever to the mass infection of unvaccinated children. Successful RCTs of the pediatric vaccine didn’t alter his opinion. Dozens of observational studies showing the vaccine limited rare, but grave harms in children didn’t alter his opinion. Variants that spiked the pediatric death toll and filled up pediatric hospitals didn’t alter his opinion.
Dr. Prasad has never deviated from the position he took in January 2021, when there was no data about the pediatric COVID vaccine and he thought COVID was going away. Remember this the next time he claims to be following the evidence, data, and the science.