The Trump administration is still promoting the purported benefits of COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children even as it reduces the childhood vaccine schedule, despite research suggesting no unvaccinated young person died of COVID in a major European country at the peak of its spread and that post-vaccination heart inflammation is a real risk.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s in-house publication gave mainstream media ammunition to attack Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s scrutiny on vaccine safety and efficacy, running a study that implies COVID vaccines saved healthy kids from serious outcomes last season.
The research appeared in the CDC’s Dec. 11 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which is not peer-reviewed and was accused of publishing methodologically weak research upholding COVID dogma between President Trump’s terms. One of the loudest critics became the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator, Vinay Prasad.
The CDC’s analysis of last season’s COVID vaccine effectiveness in “immunocompetent children” surfaced again in media coverage of the vaccine schedule changes this week but also faced scrutiny from a top doctor and former deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association in the Sensible Medicine newsletter Dec. 30.
While the research estimates that COVID vaccines were 56-76% effective against “COVID-19–associated emergency department or urgent care” visits by kids without immune problems, the Associated Press led mainstream media in stretching those findings into the false claim that vaccines prevented “severe illness,” Edward Livingston wrote.
Currently a health sciences researcher at UCLA Medicine, recognized for his HIV/AIDS coverage by the National Association of LGBTQ Journalists among other awards, Livingston didn’t spare the CDC from criticism for its word choices.
“By only presenting a big number for vaccine efficacy and referring to severe disease, the CDC has misled the public and pandered to the clickbait press that thirsts for headlines, especially when they are critical of the current administration,” he said.
The administration’s continued support for COVID vaccines at all age groups and health conditions may be having limited effect, however. The CDC estimates as of Tuesday that only 7.4% of children and 16.6% of adults received this season’s vaccine, with elderly adults twice as likely as adults as a whole to have it.
9% efficacy against hospitalization
The Trump administration’s public health agencies this term somewhat resemble a married couple whose votes cancel each other out, with leaders such as Kennedy and Prasad setting an agenda that underlings either resist or slow-walk.
The CDC did not change the Biden administration’s claim that COVID vaccines are a “safer, more reliable way to build protection” than natural immunity, regardless of age or health condition, when it updated a page on current vaccines Nov. 19. It also still claims SARS-CoV-2 can kill kids or give them lifelong health problems without infection symptoms.
New Harvard-led research on Spanish youth undermines that narrative, suggesting the virus did not kill any of them at the height of its spread, while new Stanford research reiterates the well-documented elevated risk of heart inflammation for young people at low risk from COVID itself following vaccination, especially after a second mRNA dose.
Published in the peer-reviewed Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal Dec. 16, the Spanish study reviewed the effectiveness and safety of COVID mRNA vaccines in children 6-17, linking the Madrid Health System Registry with Madrilenian Health Service databases for primary care, hospital admissions and pharmacy.
The corresponding author is Miguel Hernán, who directs the five-year-old CAUSALab at Harvard’s school of public health.
Unvaccinated children accounted for 2.2 million of the 2.7 million in the study, conducted from May 2021 to December 2022 when the Omicron variant blew through vaccinated groups worldwide. Its conclusion: “The risks and benefits of COVID-19 vaccines were small in a general population of children 6–17 years of age.”
No one died from COVID in the study, whose estimates of other outcomes had wide confidence intervals because so few children developed them.
The risk difference for COVID hospitalization between unvaccinated and vaccinated kids 6-11 was 1.2 per 100,000 over 240 days, and for 12-17 year-olds, 5.3, meaning vaccinated kids had a slight edge in avoiding hospitalization.
Vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization for younger kids was only 9%, with an upper boundary of 49%. While it was 45% with an upper boundary of 72% for older kids, the estimated figure would only be 15% if the study defined COVID hospitalization “exclusively” based on a COVID diagnosis at admission, the authors said.
Former New York Times drug industry reporter Alex Berenson marveled that “about 38,000 mRNA jabs were required to avoid one Covid hospitalization – an absurdly high number given the known short-term side effects of the shots and the potential long-term risks of exposing young people to mRNA.”
He called the results “the strongest evidence yet that the oft-repeated claim that Covid has killed 2,100 American children is fiction.”
None of the younger kids in either group got myocarditis or pericarditis, forms of heart inflammation, while older vaccinated kids had a slightly higher risk, 7.6 per 100,000, compared to 6.9 for those unvaccinated.
“The highly effective SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines were essential for limiting the COVID-19 pandemic,” opens a Dec. 10 study on COVID vaccines and heart inflammation by Stanford Medicine researchers in Science Translational Medicine, which is paywalled except for its jargon-laden abstract.
“Vaccine-associated myocarditis occurs in about one in every 140,000 vaccinees after a first dose and rises to one in 32,000 after a second dose,” according to Stanford Med’s article on the NIH-funded study. “For reasons that aren’t clear, incidence peaks among male vaccinees age 30 or below, at one in 16,750 vaccinees.”
Previous research focused on younger males has pegged the risk much higher after the second mRNA dose, around 1 in 3,000 to 6,000 for 16-24 year-olds.
Stanford Med researchers discovered two proteins, CXCL10 and IFN-gamma, in the blood of vaccinated individuals who developed myocarditis, the article said.
These cytokines – “signaling substances that immune cells secrete to carry on chemical conversations with one another” – trigger “macrophage and neutrophil infiltration,” which the article describes as “shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later warrior immune cells [that] often unload friendly fire” on healthy tissue, in this case the heart.
“Elevated inflammatory cytokine signaling could be a class effect of mRNA vaccines,” but previous research suggests their harmful effects could be mitigated by genistein, “a mild estrogen-like substance derived from soybeans” with anti-inflammatory properties, the article says.
