Questioning COVID-19 competence

OPINION:

Faith in the nation’s public health system is ebbing, and for good reason. It is a disturbing trend, and it’s largely due to a stubborn inability to remedy the limited effectiveness of officialdom’s coronavirus countermeasures.

A recent Pew Research Center survey found the percentage of U.S. adults saying health officials have done a good or excellent job fighting the pandemic has plummeted from 79% in March 2020 to 52% in May 2022.

Concurrently, the new BA.5 virus variant is putting the pandemic back in the news just as reports surface contending public health officials have allowed “bad science” to form the basis of their fight against COVID-19.

A July 14 commonsense.news online post contends that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recent recommendation that children under five years of age be vaccinated “was based on extremely weak, inconclusive data” submitted by vaccine manufacturers Pfizer and Moderna, write Dr. Marty Makary, professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University and Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, a consultant epidemiologist with the Florida Department of Health.

Testing its vaccine on children from 6 months to 2 years, “Pfizer reported a range of vaccine efficacy so wide that no conclusion could be inferred,” they write. And Moderna’s tests against asymptomatic infections “claimed a very weak vaccine efficacy of just 4% in children aged six months to two years.” Against symptomatic infections, the Moderna vaccine performed only slightly better: 50% efficacy for ages 6 months to 2 years; 42% for ages 2 to six 6 years.

The doctors quoted an unnamed CDC physician: “The public has no idea how bad this data really is. It would not pass muster for any other authorization.” Given the rarity of serious illness in small children, the revelation would hardly make parents enthused to subject their toddlers to the experimental drugs.

Concurrently, more than 82 million expired doses of the vaccines reportedly have been discarded in the U.S. since becoming available in December 2020. While uninformed vaccine phobias may account for some of the waste, other reasons include government-mandated, early-pandemic strategies that have failed to prove their worth.

Requirements for face masks in schools have been found to be practically useless in slowing transmission among children. And school-closure orders kept kids isolated, cutting them off from the human contact essential for learning. 

Nevertheless, the CDC in June began urging all U.S. parents to vaccinate their children under age 5, irrespective of the fact that as of February, 75% of U.S. schoolchildren had already contracted COVID-19. Granted, current variants are more infectious and better able to circumvent natural immunity, but they are also reported to be less harmful. With the rate of cases and deaths now low and flat, parents shouldn’t be faulted for pondering the competence of officials urging them to inject healthy, previously infected children with insufficiently studied remedies.

Lacking convincing evidence that officialdom’s coronavirus countermeasures are effective, Americans are demonstrating healthy skepticism toward doctors’ orders that look like repeated doses of ineptitude.