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Why is this such a taboo subject?

No one is talking about the risks of over vaccinating young people. This is a taboo subject. To bolster this claim, I present you with an article titled “Should Teen Boys Get Boosted” from The Atlantic, a widely-read international magazine. This article quoted world famous vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit saying that he did not feel young people benefitted from boosters and that he advised his own son against getting a booster.

You can also learn Dr. Offit’s opinion on this taboo subject in articles titled “Too Much Focus on Boosters, Says FDA Vaccine Advisor“, “Top Doctors Refuse to Give Their Own Kids a Third Shot“, and “A Skeptic’s Case Against Boosting Everyone“. You can read an editorial he wrote in The Washington Post titled “We Don’t Need Universal Booster shots. We Need to Reach the Unvaccinated“. He shared his thoughts on this taboo subject on ZDoggMd’s large podcast, twice (here and here). Dr. Offit’s thoughts about this taboo subject, as well as his strong support for the first two vaccine doses, were even discussed right here on Science Based Medicine.

Some smart people agree with Dr. Offit about this taboo subject and have expressed their views publicly. World Health Organization Chief Scientist, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, recently broached this taboo subject, saying “there’s no evidence right now” that suggests healthy children and adolescents need booster shots. Dr. Amesh Adalja, of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said “I don’t think there’s any strong evidence that we’ve seen waning immunity in teenagers, especially against what matters – serious disease”. Dr. Walid Gellad, a drug policy researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, also said “We need to be very certain about benefits because the risks remain uncertain. I am not sure that we know enough about the benefits or the risks to clearly say the benefits outweigh the risks”.

These people all take issue with the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which voted 13-to-1 to approve the third shot. You can watch their 4-hour meeting where the risks and benefits of this taboo topic were extensively discussed in public. If you just want to review their slides on this taboo subject, you can do so here. Since this subject is taboo, myocarditis was only mentioned 62 times.

Even though the risk of over-vaccinating young people is a taboo subject, the stakes could not be higher. According to data from the VAERS, in just under 1 million people age 16-24 years who received a booster, there were 4 confirmed myocarditis cases, all recovered, with 9 cases still under review. Moreover, researchers on vaccine-related myocarditis say that while long-term monitoring is needed, “most cases of suspected COVID-19 vaccine-related myocarditis in people younger than 21 are mild and resolve quickly”.

Meanwhile, consider that 764 children are being hospitalized with COVID-19 every day. This is not a taboo subject. Newspapers were bursting with headlines of a record number of children being hospitalized this winter, most of them unvaccinated. In New York’s recent omicron wave, of the children recently-admitted to hospitals “91% of 5 – 11-year-olds were unvaccinated and only 4% were fully vaccinated. Among 12-17-year-olds, 65% were unvaccinated while 26% were fully vaccinated”. You never read any articles about hospitals being deluged with vaccine-injured children did you? That’s because this is a taboo subject.

COVID-19 vaccines & kids: Why are officials not discussing the myocarditis risk?

To learn more about boosters in children, you can also listen to this podcast with Drs. Marty Makary, Zubin Damania, and Monica Gandhi. They’ve been reliable, trustworthy guides this pandemic, repeatedly telling us that it’s over, for real this time. They are careful to avoid the tribalism and groupthink that plague other doctors. For example, even though not a single child in the entire world is known to have died from the vaccine, and healthy children have definitely died from the virus, Dr. Makary said on this podcast, “maybe the rate of death from the vaccine parallels the rate of death from COVID in a healthy child”. You won’t get that sort of nuance from vaccine-absolutists, and their slavish devotion to “facts“.

In a segment called “COVID-19 Vaccines & Kids: Why Are Officials Not Discussing the Myocarditis Risk“, podcast listeners also heard that:

It’s impossible to have the discussion, if you are coming at it from the advocacy point of view, that there might be a risk associated with the vaccine…In a moment we are going to talk about myocarditis with Moderna, nobody wants to talk about that.

That’s right! The entire topic of vaccine myocarditis is taboo. Who has talked about it besides me and my guests? No one. Unlike doctors who work with hospitalized COVID-19 patients, I am not afraid to discuss taboo topics. Whether it’s accurate or not, I’ll share the information “they” don’t want you to know about.

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  • Dr. Jonathan Howard is a neurologist and psychiatrist who has been interested in vaccines since long before COVID-19. He is the author of "We Want Them Infected: How the failed quest for herd immunity led doctors to embrace the anti-vaccine movement and blinded Americans to the threat of COVID."

Posted by Jonathan Howard

Dr. Jonathan Howard is a neurologist and psychiatrist who has been interested in vaccines since long before COVID-19. He is the author of "We Want Them Infected: How the failed quest for herd immunity led doctors to embrace the anti-vaccine movement and blinded Americans to the threat of COVID."