A look at some of the top headlines trending online today including the latest updates on Russias invasion of Ukraine, the Jan. 6 committee, the coronavirus and much more.
Biden says his comment about Putin not remaining in power reflects moral outrage, not a policy change (USA Today)
Ukraine and Russia resume peace talks with no handshake (Reuters)
Ukraines other fight: Growing food for itself and the world (AP)
Russia seems focused for now on liberating parts of eastern Ukraine (NPR)
Judge OKs emails to Jan. 6 panel, sees likely Trump crimes (AP)
Jared Kushner to appear before House January 6 committee on Thursday, sources say (CBS)
DeSantis signs bill dubbed dont say gay, says that its about parents rights (Miami Herald)
Bidens 2023 budget to target billionaires, boost military funds (NBC)
What to know about a 2nd COVID-19 booster for people over age 50 (ABC)
WHO examining potential hearing problems linked to Covid vaccines (NBC)
CDC adds no new destinations to its highest-risk category (CNN)
Shanghai lockdown tests zero-COVID limits, shakes markets (AP)
Will Smith Apologizes to Chris Rock After Academy Condemns His Slap (NY Times)
Phil Collins bids emotional farewell to fans at his final concert (NY Post)
Blue Origins 4th astro-tourism flight set to launch without big names (Reuters)
FedEx founder Fred Smith stepping down as CEO (Fox)
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Drug giants Pfizer and Moderna makers of the countrys most widely used vaccines in the fight against COVID-19 are now seeking approval for a second booster shot as immunity wanes and more contagious variants come ashore. Good news for some.
But now many of the nearly 17 million Americans like Brian King who got the Johnson & Johnson jabare wondering, What about us?
I understand that were a minority share of vaccinated people, said King of Redwood City, who had the J&J shot and a Moderna booster. But seeing stories that only discuss the effectiveness of the more common vaccines leaves me with less information than Id like about such an important public health issue.
In the early rush to develop vaccines to combat the deadly coronavirus, Johnson & Johnsons one-shot contribution was roundly heralded. It promised protection two weeks after a single shot, didnt use the new messenger-RNA technology of the other brands or need special cold storage, making it attractive for people without easy access to pharmacies and health care facilities.
But in April 2021, a rare but serious blood clot issue was reported, production problems further delayed its rollout and finally, regulators largely recommended the other available vaccines. The vaccine never regained its footing.
More than a year later, most Americans considered up to date on their COVID vaccines have been given three shots an initial two and then a booster by Pfizer or Moderna. Those who started with Johnson & Johnsons single dose have been told to get just one more. King said he understands health officials are doing their best but wishes for more information and direction.
Other countries like Germany and France have called for J&Js shot to be followed by two other doses. The city of San Francisco has made third shots available, too, citing studies suggesting a J&J shot and single booster isnt good enough, and many doctors have urged a third dose. But federal health authorities have been silent on whether J&J plus a booster is as good as three Pfizer or Moderna shots, let alone four.
Asked whether the J&J shot and one booster is enough, the CDC simply referred to its current guidance of one Pfizer or Moderna booster, and two only for those with compromised immunity.
I think its a dereliction of duty by the CDC to not address the situation, said Dr. Michael Lin, an associate professor of neurobiology and bioengineering at Stanford University who strongly recommends a third dose for Johnson & Johnson vaccine recipients. The data are very clear. You need a third dose.
Evidence of waning immunity and the emergence of more contagious virus variants like delta and omicron spurred approval for booster doses last fall for all three authorized vaccines in the U.S. initially with no brand preference. Those vaccinated with Pfizer or Moderna were urged to get a booster five months after their second shot, and those who had J&J were told to get a booster after two months.
Then, in December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines over J&J for primary and booster shots, citing safety concerns.
Still, 16.8 million Americans received J&Js shot as their primary COVID-19 vaccine, about 8% of the U.S. total. In California, they include Gov. Gavin Newsom and Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly. Nearly 1.5 million got a J&J booster.
Assessing the efficacy of vaccines and boosters is challenging because its unclear how long their protection lasts as the virus mutates into new variants. Trials and studies based on the original strain or last summers delta are obsolete now with omicron and its more contagious sub-variant BA.2.
Unlike Pfizer and Moderna, Johnson & Johnson hasnt sought approval for a second booster. Instead, the company points to studies it says demonstrate the durability of protection from its vaccine. A March 17 study found J&J protection against the delta variant in the U.S. remained stable for six months.
An earlier Jan. 6 study found that while all three U.S. vaccines maintained protection against intensive-care hospitalizations, there was no increase in hospitalizations and only modest waning of protection against breakthrough infections six months after the J&J shot.
And a Dec. 30 study found the J&J booster was 85% effective in preventing hospitalization in South Africa when the omicron variant was prevalent.
But Dr. Bob Wachter, who chairs the medical department at UC San Francisco, said back in December that a J&J shot and Pfizer or Moderna booster offered only about the same protection as two primary Pfizer or Moderna shots.
Stanfords Dr. Lin points also to other studies he says show a J&J shot and booster are inferior to three Pfizer or Moderna shots. And San Francisco pointed to five studies in its Jan. 13 announcement that it would offer second boosters to J&J recipients who live or were vaccinated in the city.
Some who had the J&J shot havent waited for the governments guidance.
Aneela Mirchandani of San Francisco got a Pfizer booster in July after her April J&J shot, and another in December before she and her husband planned to travel.
I was hearing from doctors I know that despite the CDC, they were telling patients to boost it with a Pfizer or Moderna even though J&J was supposed to be a single shot, Mirchandani said. We were seeing delta shoot the numbers up, so we just got the second Pfizer and didnt worry about it too much.
Nearly a year after that first J&J shot, they remain COVID-free.
Vaccines have been a critical tool in managing the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers have been working on vaccines against the novel coronavirus, known as SARS-CoV-2, since it was first identified and characterized.
In fact, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that more than 200 COVID-19 vaccine candidates were in development in December of 2020. Since then, several vaccines have been authorized or approved for use around the world.
Generally speaking, there are four different types of COVID-19 vaccines that are being used throughout the world. Keep reading to learn what these are, how they work, and more.
As just mentioned, there are four types of COVID-19 vaccines that are being used around the world. These are:
The table below provides a brief summary of the different types of COVID-19 vaccines and the branded names that theyre associated with.
The mRNA vaccines work by teaching your body to make a protein from the novel coronavirus. This protein is called the spike protein. Normally, the virus uses it to attach to and enter cells.
These vaccines contain a molecule called mRNA thats surrounded by a protective lipid (fat) layer. The function of mRNA is to tell cells how to make proteins. Your cells use mRNA every day to make proteins that are vital for life.
Heres how the mRNA vaccines work:
There are currently two mRNA vaccines in use. These are the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. Both of these vaccines are given as two doses. The Pfizer-BioNTech does are spaced out over 21 days (3 weeks). The Moderna doses are spaced out over 28 days (4 weeks).
Large-scale clinical trials found that both mRNA vaccines were very effective. Vaccine effectiveness was found to be 95 percent and 94.1 percent for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, in that order.
However, much has changed since these trials. Variants of the novel coronavirus have emerged, such as the highly infectious Omicron variant. The mRNA vaccines are less effective against these variants.
Because of the rise of variants as well as naturally decreasing immunity, public health organizations around the world have recommended booster doses.
As a result, research has focused on vaccine effectiveness in terms of variants and booster doses. Lets see what some of this research says.
A 2022 study examined the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine between November 2021 and January 2022. This studys findings about the effectiveness against the Omicron variant were as follows:
Another 2022 study looked at the effectiveness of the Moderna vaccine against the Omicron variant. This study reported the following:
Viral vector vaccines for COVID-19 use a modified virus to deliver instructions to your cells on how to make the spike protein. The modified virus is harmless and cant make copies of itself or cause disease.
The viral vector vaccines for COVID-19 all use an adenovirus vector. In nature, adenoviruses can cause cold- or flu-like symptoms.
Viral vector vaccines work in the following way:
There are a few examples of viral vector vaccines in use throughout the world. These include:
The large-scale clinical trials of the J&J vaccine found that a single vaccine dose was 66.9 percent effective for preventing moderate to severe or critical COVID-19.
Clinical trials of the AstraZeneca vaccine found that overall vaccine effectiveness after two doses was 70.4 percent.
The arrival of the Omicron variant has hit viral vector vaccines pretty hard. However, receiving a booster with an mRNA vaccine can help.
One of the 2022 studies discussed earlier also looked at the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca vaccine against the Omicron variant. This studys findings were as follows:
Protein subunit vaccines are pretty straightforward. They contain a purified protein from a virus that the immune system can see and respond to. In the case of the novel coronavirus, this protein is the spike protein.
Protein subunit vaccines work in the following way:
There are various protein subunit vaccines in development. One that you may have heard of is the Novavax vaccine, which is given in two doses spaced 21 days (3 weeks) apart.
The spike protein in the Novavax vaccine is made in cells in a laboratory and is purified before being stuck onto a tiny, round particle called a nanoparticle. This design imitates the shape of the novel coronavirus and also helps to group many spike proteins together so that the immune system can see them.
A large-scale clinical trial of the Novavax vaccine found that its effectiveness was 90.4 percent.
However, this trial was performed in early 2021, before the arrival of the Delta and Omicron variants. Detailed data on the Novavax vaccines effectiveness against these variants havent been published yet.
So far, Novavax has released a statement based off of early data that antibodies from the first two-dose vaccine series have some effectiveness against the Omicron variant. Protection also increased after a booster dose.
The last type of COVID-19 vaccines are whole virus vaccines. These vaccines contain whole virus particles, known as virions, of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
The only whole virus vaccines that are in use are inactivated. In an inactivated vaccine, the virus has been treated so that it remains whole but cant cause disease. This is typically accomplished by using chemicals or heat.
An inactivated whole virus vaccine works in the following way:
Two examples of inactivated whole virus vaccines are the Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines.
A 2021 study of the Sinovac vaccine, called CoronaVac, found that vaccine was only 46.8 percent effective against symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection after the second vaccine dose.
The Omicron variant has greatly impacted the effectiveness of the available inactivated vaccines.
Overall, researchers are finding that these vaccines provide little to no protection against this variant. However, boosters with another type of vaccine may help to restore this protection.
Before being used on a wide scale, all vaccines need to be shown to be both safe and effective in large-scale clinical trials.
In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reviews the data from these trials before approving the vaccine or issuing an emergency use authorization.
Generally speaking, some of the most common side effects of COVID-19 vaccines are:
These side effects typically come on within a day of receiving a vaccine dose. They only last a few days before going away on their own.
If you have side effects such as fatigue, fever, and muscle pain, you may feel as if the vaccine is making you sick. However, these symptoms are completely normal and are actually a sign that your body is creating an immune response to the vaccine.
There are some people who shouldnt receive a COVID-19 vaccine. This is called a contraindication to vaccination. For the vaccines that are currently in use in the United States, the only contraindications to COVID-19 vaccines are:
In rare situations, mRNA vaccines can lead to myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes that this is more common:
According to a 2021 study of 139 teens and young adults with suspected myocarditis after vaccination, the condition was typically mild and resolved quickly when treatment was given.
Additionally, a 2022 study found that a person was more likely to develop myocarditis after contracting SARS-CoV-2 than after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.
Although very rare, serious side effects such as TTS and Guillain-Barr syndrome (GBS) have been reported after vaccination with viral vector vaccines such as the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines.
Based off of an updated risk-benefit analysis, the CDC is now recommending that people receive an mRNA vaccine over the J&J vaccine. This recommendation was made based on the fact that the J&J vaccine:
Similarly, the United Kingdom offers alternatives to the AstraZeneca vaccine in individuals under the age of 40. These alternatives were offered because people in this age group, particularly people assigned female at birth, are at a higher risk of TTS.
There are several different types of COVID-19 vaccines. These vaccines all work in different ways to prepare your immune system to respond to the novel coronavirus, should you be exposed to it.
Before being widely used, vaccines must go through a rigorous clinical trial process to assess their safety and effectiveness. As such, vaccines that have been authorized or approved have been shown to be safe and effective.
To increase your protection against COVID-19, its important to stay up to date on your COVID-19 vaccinations. Never hesitate to talk with a doctor or other healthcare professional if you have any concerns or questions about vaccination.
Brazzaville/Copenhagen The European Commissions Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO) is supporting the work of the World Health Organization (WHO) to boost COVID-19 vaccination campaigns and increase coverage in 15 African countries.
With a total of 16 million from ECHO, WHO is supporting operational and technical aspects of the vaccine rollout over 18 months in the following countries: Burundi; Cameroon; Central African Republic; Chad; Democratic Republic of the Congo; Guinea; Liberia; Madagascar; Mali; Mozambique; Niger; Nigeria; Somalia; South Sudan Republic, and Sudan.The grant is also helping to reinforce the capacity of health workers to plan, coordinate and deploy the vaccines as well as monitor and document the results of the rollout and adequately investigate and report any adverse events following immunization.
The funding is part of the European Unions (EU) humanitarian initiative for COVID-19 vaccination in Africa which aims to ensure increased access including for the most vulnerable as well as those living in hard-to-reach, remote and conflict-affected areas. It is also one of the many contributions from the EU and its Member States to the COVID-19 response. The EU also supports the COVAX Facility, the vaccines part of the Access to COVID-19 Tools-Accelerator created to develop and deliver tools to fight the pandemic.
Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, the EU, its Member States and European financial institutions have come together as Team Europe, contributing to the fight against the pandemic around the world, supporting in particular the African continent, said Paraskevi Michou, Director General for Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection in the European Commission. In addition to being a leading donor to the COVAX Facility, the EU supports local manufacturing of medicines and vaccines, the strengthening of research, analysis and sequencing capacities, as well as the improvement of health systems at regional and national levels in Africa. The EU has also provided a total of 100 million in humanitarian assistance to specifically support the rollout of vaccination campaigns in Africa, to help ensure equitable access to vaccines for vulnerable people, including in conflict-affected or hard-to-access areas. Our strong cooperation with the World Health Organization is instrumental in implementing this programme successfully.
Efforts are ongoing to scale up COVID-19 vaccine coverage in Africa, where only 15% of the population is fully vaccinated so far. Around 404 million of the more than 716 million doses the continent has received to date have been administered.
In a fresh drive to support countries scale up vaccination, WHO and partner organizations have deployed more than 60 experts on the ground to form part of country expert teams. These teams are working to strengthen coordination, logistical and financial planning, including microplanning, surveillance of adverse events following immunization as well as vaccine uptake and stock data management. WHO partners are also working with people in the communities to strengthen trust and confidence in vaccination.
With African countries striving to expand the COVID-19 vaccination coverage, the support by the European Union injects a crucial momentum into the drive to scale up coverage on continent. Vaccination is the best protection against the adverse impact of the virus and will also prevent new variants from emerging and threatening not only Africa but the world., said Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa.
The vaccination campaigns prioritize vulnerable and high-risk populations such as health workers, older people, those with co-morbidities, in particularly living in fragile, conflict-affected and humanitarian contexts, including in refugee camps.
Solidarity is key to ending this pandemic and to building back better. These are not just words. These principles have been already exemplified by the generous support with vaccines and funding provided by the European Union to the global pandemic response. Together in Europe, in Africa and beyond, WHO and the EU are working with local partners to ensure COVID-19 vaccination reaches the arms of everyone and that lessons learned contribute to resilient health systems, said Dr Hans Henri P. Kluge, WHO Regional Director for Europe.
As the continent battles the pandemic it is also crucial to step up the efforts to address other vaccine-preventable disease as well as bolster health systems to provide accessible, quality and affordable care.
This is a nuanced issue, and context matters. Children are certainly at risk from COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, children accounted for fewer than 3% of cases; today, they account for about 25%. More than 6 million U.S. children have contracted COVID-19, including 2 million ages 5 to 11. Any COVID-19 infection, no matter how trivial, creates the possibility of disruption of home and school activity.
The highly uneven global distribution of Covid-19 vaccines is exacerbating deadly inequalities betweenand withincountries, threatening to undermine socio-economic gains throughout the developing world, the United Nations warned Monday.
"The speed with which the world gets vaccinated in 2022 is critical to avoid more lost ground in contexts where progress is needed the most."
Two years into a pandemic that has killed millions, 2.8 billion people91% of whom reside in low-income nationshave yet to receive their first lifesaving shot, according to a new analysis released this month by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP).
Although there has been a substantial increase in the total number of Covid-19 vaccines administered over the past several months, the allocation of doses remains starkly unequal. Of the 10.7 billion jabs given out worldwide, just 1% have gone into the arms of people in low-income countries, the UNDP found.
In addition to giving the coronavirus more opportunities to circulate among unprotected populationsincreasing the likelihood of new, potentially vaccine-resistant variants emerging and further prolonging the global public health emergencyvaccine inequity has harmed national economic recovery efforts, thereby widening "the poverty gap between rich and poor countries" and worsening inequalities within them, said the UNDP.
As of last month, 50 out of 54 countries in Africa were not on track to reach the World Health Organization's (WHO) target of inoculating 70% of their populations by mid-2022.
"Most of the vulnerable countries are found in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Chad, where less than 1% of the populations are fully vaccinated," said the UNDP. "And outside of Africa, Haiti and Yemen are still to reach 2% coverage."
Inside each nation, "the pandemic is hitting vulnerable and marginalized groups hardest," the UNDP continued. "Progress in education completion is expected to be reversed, especially among children from the poorest households. Gender disparities are increasing, with spikes in gender-based violence and less than 20% of countries' pandemic support geared towards women. And informal workers have been disproportionally hit by extended lockdowns."
Using data from the Global Dashboard of Vaccine Equity, developed by the UNDP, WHO, and the University of Oxford, the analysis shows how inequitable access to Covid-19 vaccination "will not only affect poorer countries disproportionally in terms of health, but also have a profound and lasting impact on their socio-economic recovery."
Lamenting numerous "lost opportunities," the UNDP found that "if low-income countries had the same vaccination rate as high-income countries in September last year (54%), they would have increased their GDP by US$16.27 billion in 2021, which could have been used to address other pressing development challengeseducation, healthcare, [and] energy for all, for example."
Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda have lost the most potential income as a result of what global health justice campaigners have called "vaccine apartheid" during the pandemic, according to the U.N.
While governments in wealthy nations have been better able to soften the financial impact of the pandemic by providing vaccines and "more comprehensive and longer-lasting economic support" to various kinds of workers, the world's 1.6 billion informal workers "saw their earnings decline by 60% in 2020," and in "some countries with a large informal sector, like Uganda, Bangladesh and Colombia, experienced a significant increase in the number of days of complete lockdown in 2021, before reaching higher vaccination coverage," the UNDP pointed out.
"The speed with which the world gets vaccinated in 2022 is critical to avoid more lost ground in contexts where progress is needed the most," the agency wrote. "As many as 19 million people need to be inoculated each week in low-income countries to reach the 70% target by mid-2022, which represents an increase by over 800% compared to current rates."
"As many as 19 million people need to be inoculated each week in low-income countries to reach the 70% target by mid-2022, which represents an increase by over 800% compared to current rates."
As the UNDP explained, "reaching the 70% target means that countries that can least afford it will have to boost health spending by a disproportionate amount compared to richer countries." Whereas high-income nations have to increase healthcare spending by an average of just 0.8% to vaccinate 70% of their populations, their impoverished counterparts have to scale up expenditures by an average of 56.6% to achieve the same goal.
"For low-income countries, the spending required on vaccines equals 59% of the annual average investment needs to end extreme poverty by 2030 (SDG 1.1) or 89% of the average expenditure needs per year to ensure that all girls and boys can complete free, equitable, and quality primary and secondary education (SDG 4.1)," said the UNDP, alluding to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are being put on the back burner, possibly leading to what U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet earlier this month described as a "lost decade for development."
To prevent developing countries from accumulating more debt in the process, the UNDP endorsed financing vaccination campaigns through grants and concessions as recently proposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The agency also emphasized the need to pay greater attention to the "logistics and planning needed to effectively distribute vaccines on the ground, especially in low-resource settings."
Although the UNDP has called for "urgent action to boost supply, share vaccines, and ensure they're accessible to everyone," the agency's new analysis doesn't mention potential solutions proposed by vaccine equity campaigners.
For instance, many experts, including former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, have demanded the temporary suspension of coronavirus-related intellectual property restrictions, which they say will enable qualified manufacturers around the world to boost the supply of generic tests, jabs, and treatments, paving the way for more equitable distribution.
Others have argued that while the fight for a robust patent waiver continues, the United States and other rich governments should invest in the creation of regional manufacturing hubs to ramp up the public production of vaccines. The U.S., for instance, owns a patent underlying mRNA technology, giving it significant leverage to share knowledge over the objections of profit-maximizing pharmaceutical companies.
The UNDP estimates that the cost of vaccinating 70% of the world's population by mid-2022 to be $18 billion, while Public Citizen has developed a blueprint showing how the U.S. could produce enough doses to protect the world from Covid-19 for $25 billion, or roughly 3% of President Joe Biden's latest military budget request of $813 billion.
With few days left in the 2022 legislative session, a bill seeking to fight vaccine mandates died in a Senate committee.
House Bill 28, sponsored by Rep. Savannah Maddox, was originally drafted to state private and public entities could not mandate the COVID-19 vaccine.
However, the bill was altered throughout the legislative process to remove private employers and was left with language barring public colleges and universities as well as local and state governments from requiring disclosure of a persons coronavirus-related immunization status. It also sought to ban vaccine passports.
While it was passed by a House committee and the full House, it failed in the Senate Health and Welfare Committee with only four yes votes.
Senate Health and Welfare Committee Chair Ralph Alvarado noted the sponsor had not done what he felt was the proper legwork in the Senate to get the bill passed but the legislation had been called at the sponsors request.
Unless the language of the bill is placed into another bill as a vehicle, it is dead for the 2022 session.
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According to Mother Caterina, there is no other explanation for the closure than the refusal of the five remaining sisters to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
PERUGIA, Italy The head of a cloistered Benedictine convent in Perugia, central Italy, has said that her community will be closed because the nuns opposed the COVID-19 vaccine.
Speculation about the closure of the Monastery of Santa Caterina has swirled since the news emerged that the Vatican had conducted an apostolic visitation, or inspection. But the local archdiocese told CNA that it knew nothing about the convents possible closure.
In an interview with the website Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, the abbess said that the only reason she was given for the closure was that the five resident nuns did not want to be vaccinated.
Shortly after mid-February, there was the apostolic visit immediately after the report was sent, said Mother Caterina. Now we are waiting for the response from the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life.
She said that she had learned of the visitation from Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti, the archbishop of Perugia-Citt della Pieve, but only when she went to him to have a document signed. The cardinal said he did not know the reasons for the visitation and had simply been informed that it was taking place.
The apostolic visitor was Mother Cristina Ianni of the Poor Clares of Orvieto.
The Monastery of Santa Caterina is a historic building. It was the seat of the Poor Clares as early as the 13th century and was initially dedicated to St. Giuliana (Juliana of Nicomedia). In 1649, with the transfer of the Benedictine nuns of Santa Caterina Vecchia, it took its current name.
After the unification of Italy in the 19th century, part of the monastery was redesigned. First, it served as a match factory. Today, it houses the offices of the Superintendency of Architectural Heritage.
According to Mother Caterina, there is no other explanation for the closure than the refusal of the five remaining sisters to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
She said that, in her view, the possible closure was not due to the small number of nuns, although Pope Francis 2016 apostolic constitution Vultum Dei quaerere encourages small monasteries to close or federate.
In a press release, the archdiocese of Perugia-Citt della Pieve noted that visitations are initiated by the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. Therefore, nothing could be known for certain about the imminent closure of the monastery, much less on the fact that the reason for a possible closure is due to the non-vaccination of the nuns present there against COVID-19.
The archdiocese stressed that Cardinal Bassetti never intervened on the internal issues of the monastery and not even on issues relating to the vaccination of the nuns.
The archdiocese denied journalistic insinuations that the nuns were being transferred because they refused to undergo vaccination.
The March 24 statement also underlined that the cardinal had not yet received any reports regarding the state of the monastery from a spiritual, liturgical, and economic point of view.
The archdiocese said that the monastery is owned by the Benedictine Order which has the exclusive right regarding its possible destination or alienation following the closure of the monastery. Therefore any involvement of the archdiocese in this regard is devoid of any foundation.
The statement also emphasized how precious the monastic presence is for the life of the Church and how it has always tried to accompany it with paternity and respect and enhance it in all its charismatic richness.
Therefore, it can only experience this moment with pain, which instead of building ecclesial unity and communion, wounds it with news and insinuations that do not correspond to the reality of the facts, it concluded.
Regular readers might be getting tired of my pointing out how theres nothing new under the antivax sun in terms of deceptive arguments, conspiracy theories, and tropes designed to argue against vaccinating. However, the COVID-19 pandemic introduced these talking points to a much large audience than had ever seen them before so I considered it my duty to educate our readers and to point out that none of the antivaccine misinformation that has hit us like a tsunami since COVID-19 vaccines first entered large clinical trials in the summer of 2020 is anything new. It just seems new if you havent seen it before. Examples include, of course, misinformation claiming that the vaccine kills based on misinterpretation of the VAERS database; that it sterilizes our womenfolk; that it sheds and endangers the unvaccinated; and that it causes cancer, none of which are anything new. Even the claim that it permanently alters your DNA, although it might appear like a new talking point based on the fact that Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines were the first successful translations of mRNA technology into a clinical product, if you look really hard, is not a new claim. (Transhumanism, anyone?) As Charles Pierce likes to say, history is so cool. In this case, though, Id add: Its only cool and useful if you know about it and can use it to counter the pernicious misinformation about vaccines of the sort published by, for example, The Wall Street Journal and deconstructed by Jonathan Howard yesterday.
Last week the journal Bioethics published another example of how everything old is new again in the form of an article titled Against COVID-19 vaccination of healthy children. It might as well have been titled Against vaccination of healthy children, because pretty much every one of the arguments presented could be used to argue against long-accepted childhood vaccines that have been mandated as a prerequisite for school enrollment in the US for decades. Ill explain in a moment, but, given that this is presented as piece of serious scholarship, I wondered who was behind it. It turned out to be from a last-year graduate student named Steven R. Kraaijeveld at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and Associate Fellow at the Research Consortium on the Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies. Its noted in the Biographies section that his PhD dissertation is on the ethics of vaccination. His research focuses on philosophy and ethics of technology, medical ethics, public health ethics, and moral psychology. After reading this article, Id say that he needs to go back to the drawing board, particularly given the Tweets with which he bragged about his paper on Friday:
In the thread, as he lists his reasons for arguing against the both routine and mandatory COVID-19 vaccination of healthy children he brags about all the data that back up his ethical conclusions, after, of course regurgitating the health freedom and parental rights arguments that have long been a staple of antivaccine activists going back decades:
Mr. Kraaijevelds co-authors include Rachel Gur-Arie, PhD, MS, Hecht-Levi Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics and Infectious Disease at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University, and Euzebiusz Jamrozik, MD, PhD, practicing Internal Medicine Physician and fellow in Ethics and Infectious Diseases at Ethox and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities at the University of Oxford, as well as Head of the Monash-WHO Collaborating Centre for bioethics at the Monash Bioethics Centre. Youd think that at least Dr. Jamrozik would be aware of the antivaccine tropes being recycled in this graduate students paper, but apparently not. Ive found that, depressingly, a lot of academics who actually work on infectious diseases and vaccines are blissfully unaware of common antivaccine tropes, which leads them to regurgitate them inadvertently in a much more palatable, academic-seeming form. This is what this paper does.
In the case of this article, its hard not to think of Bioethics like this.
In fairness, I will give the authors a modicum of credit in that they seem to realize that their arguments could be used to argue against other childhood vaccines. They even say so in the introduction, claiming that theyll show you why the arguments in favor of routine vaccination of children against COVID-19, arguments that they find compelling for other childhood vaccines, dont hold up for COVID-19 vaccines. In fact, as Ill show, the arguments they make against the key pillars of the case for vaccinating children against COVID-19 could just as easily be deployed against many, if not most, childhood vaccines currently in use and long accepted.
Kraaijeveld notes:
This article presents an analysis of the ethics of vaccinating healthy children against COVID-19 by responding to the strongest arguments that might favor such an approach.5 In particular, we present three arguments that might justify routine6 COVID-19 vaccination of children, based on (a) an argument from paternalism, (b) an argument from indirect protection and altruism, and (c) an argument from the global public health aim of COVID-19 eradication.7 We offer a series of objections to each respective argument to show that, given the best available data, none of them is tenable. These arguments, which might be compelling for childhood vaccination against other diseases and in different circumstances,8 do not appear to hold in the case of COVID-19 with the currently available vaccines. Given the present state of affairs and all things considered, COVID-19 vaccination of healthy children is ethically unjustified.
If one accepts our conclusion that routine vaccination of healthy children against COVID-19 is ethically unjustified, then it follows that coercion, which is an ethically problematic issue in itself, is even less warranted. Nonetheless, mandatory vaccination of healthy children against COVID-19 is already being consideredand, in some places, implementedas a way of increasing vaccine uptake.9 We therefore also provide two objections specifically against making COVID-19 vaccination mandatory for children, which center on additional ethical concerns about overriding the autonomy of parents and legal guardians and of children who are capable of making autonomous decisions. If vaccinating healthy children against COVID-19 is ethically problematic, then coercing vaccination is even less acceptablebut even if vaccinating healthy children against COVID-19 should at some future point be considered more defensible (e.g., should a much more favorable costbenefit analysis emerge), important ethical objections against coercive mandates will still remain.
As I said before, Mr. Kraaijeveld is recycling the health freedom and parental rights arguments that portray any attempt to require vaccines for children before entering public school or daycare facilities as an unacceptable fascistic assault of freedom. Its a very old antivaccine argument that takes a reasonable debate about the limits of what can be mandated in the service of public health and turns it into a Manichean view that portrays any sort of mandate or even mild coercion as evil. One has only to look at the Defeat the Mandates rally held in Washington, DC in January (with a repeat scheduled for Los Angeles in April) to see this argument taken to an extreme.
Its true that Defeat the Mandates tends to include more than vaccine mandates, but it also adds a healthy dash of parental rights to the rhetoric of health freedom, all with a Boomer-friendly design (note the font) reminiscent of Woodstock.
Lets look at Mr. Kraaijevelds main arguments one by one.
Mr. Kraaijeveld begins by characterizing the appeal to paternalism thusly:
The first argument in favor of childhood vaccination for COVID-19 derives from paternalistic considerations and holds that routine vaccination of healthy children is justified because it is in the best interests of the would-be vaccinated children. The argument from paternalism suggests that COVID-19 vaccination will, all things considered, benefit children the most (or cause them the least harm). Given that routine vaccination is the most effective way to ensure vaccine uptake, it is therefore justified for the sake of the health and well-being of children themselves.
Unsurprisingly, his objections are twofold:
Both Dr. Howard and I have been repeating for months now how these claims are not only wrong, but echo the same claims made by antivaxxers about the MMR vaccine. Whenever the argument that we shouldnt vaccinate children against COVID-19 because the disease isnt that dangerous to children (i.e., quite literally, doesnt kill that many children), Im reminded of the appeal to the Brady Bunch commonly repeated by antivaxxers in 2015. Ill discuss that more in a moment, but first lets see what Mr. Kraaijeveld actually argues:
According to the best available data, healthy children are at a much lower risk of severe illness from COVID-19 and are less susceptible to infection than older adults.10 In contrast to many other vaccine-preventable diseases, healthy children are at low risk of severe COVID-19 infection, morbidity, and mortality.11 Hospitalization of children with COVID-19 is rare, although emerging data suggest that children with severe underlying comorbidities are at higher risk.12 Deaths among healthy children due to COVID-19 are very rare; for example, a large study in Germany found no deaths among children aged 511 without comorbidities.13 We agree with the assessment that COVID-19 is not a pediatric public health emergency.14
That last citation (#14) is to an article by Drs. Wesley Pegden, Vinay Prasad, and Stefan Baral published in May 2021 arguing that COVID vaccines for children should not receive emergency use authorization. Dr. Howard recently discussed that article and its many flaws in great detail in follow-up to his original discussion of the article last year, which means I dont have to now. Read the articles for the details, but, in brief, Pegden et al. presented a case that made COVID-19 appear essentially harmless to healthy children (much as antivaxxers had long claimed that measles, chickenpox, and the like are essentially harmless to healthy children for years before) while leaving out information about how effective the vaccines were in children. Lets just echo what Dr. Howard said by listing again some of his key bullet points (remember, this was May 2021 and lots more children have been hospitalized and died since then in the US):
That sounds serious to me, and, remember, the Pegden et al. article was published almost 11 months ago, and, as our very own Dr. Howard pointed out, there was definitely some cherry picking going on here:
And also, others pointed out how cherry picked Mr. Kraaijevelds citations were:
Actually, it wasnt just cherry picking; it was misrepresentation, too:
Id also suggest that Mr. Kraaijeveld look at who is leaping to his defense. Personally, Id be embarrassed if I had people like this defending me:
If you want to see how bad Mr. Kraaijevelds arguments are, look no further than this passage:
Overall, the burden of COVID-19 in children appears to be similar to or lower than that of typical seasonal influenza in the winter (unlike the much higher disease burden of COVID-19 in adults).16 In 2020, 198 children aged <17 officially died of COVID-19 in the United States.17 In 2021, with Delta being the predominant variant, that number increased to 378,18 which is comparable to the official number of children aged <17 who died in the 20182019 influenza season in the United States (i.e., 372).19
Notice how every time the claim is made that COVID-19 is much less deadly (or at least no more deadly) than the flu in children (even, as I note, routine yearly vaccination against the flu is recommended for children), its always the 2018-2019 flu season thats cited, Always. Of course, that was the last complete flu season before the pandemic, which means that citing it is citing a season with zero mitigations of the likes that the pandemic brought us. There were no mask mandates, no business shutdowns, no virtual schooling, and no social distancing. Its an intellectually dishonest comparison of apples to oranges worthy of antivaccine activists (which is why Mr. Kraaijeveld really shouldnt have used it), and, as Dr. Howard put it, 1,200 is more than six. Basically, in the same environment, with mask mandates and mitigations, COVID-19 was much more deadly to children than the flu. Mr. Kraaijevelds argument boils down to the same argument antivaxxers make, namely that routine (or even mandated) vaccination of children against COVID-19 is unnecessary because its more or less harmless to healthy children and not that many children die of it. Again, it used to be accepted that children arent supposed to die if we can reasonably prevent it (which we can with COVID-19 vaccines), but arguments like Mr. Kraaijevelds amount to a shrugging of the shoulders over a level of child death that used to be considered unthinkable, even though 20% of COVID-19 deaths occur in children with no underlying conditions. Some ethics!
This brings us back to the Brady Bunch.
I last discussed the Brady Bunch gambittwo weeks ago. It was basically an antivax trope pioneered several years ago by antivaxxers about the measles. Theyd point to a 1969 episode of the classic sitcom The Brady Bunch in which all six kids (and, ultimately, Mike and Alice, who, it turns out, had never had the measles as children) caught the measles. The whole situation was played for laughs, with the kids happily staying home and playing games, the only evidence that they were ill being phony-looking red spots on their faces and limbs. It wasnt just The Brady Bunch either. Even though its only two weeks since I last cited it, heres a 2014 YouTube video that was making the rounds then:
You get the idea, I think. I consider Mr. Kraaijevelds paper to be an academic version of the Brady Bunch gambit, which is why Ill take this opportunity to point out yet again that according to the CDC, before the vaccine, 48,000 people a year were hospitalized for the measles; 4,000 developed measles-associated encephalitis; and 400 to 500 died. By any stretch of the imagination that was a significant public health problem, and the introduction of the measles vaccine in 1963, followed by the MMR in 1971, made it much less so, bringing measles under such control that it became very uncommon and deaths from it rare. As Dr. John Snyder reminded us nearly 13 years ago in his response to Dr. Sears making the same arguments in his vaccine book that touted an alternative vaccination schedule, measles is not a benign disease, regardless of what popular culture thought of it 50 or 60 years ago. (More recent data show that a severe complication of measles, subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), is more common than we used to think.) Meanwhile, over 13 years ago Dr. Sears was claiming that the risk of fatality from measles is as close to zero as you can get without actually being zero. Sound familiar? This is basically the same argument that Mr. Kraaijeveld is making for COVID-19, which has killed over 1,300 children in the US since the pandemic hit, arguably more than the average yearly toll of measles before the vaccine.
Mr. Kraaijeveld also invokes another common antivax argument:
Furthermore, post-infection immunity has been found to be at least as effective as vaccination at protecting against disease due to reinfection with COVID-19.24 An increasingly large body of evidence suggests that immunity after previous severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection is at least as robust as vaccine-induced immunity.25 Childhood exposure to SARS-CoV-2, which, as previously discussed, is generally associated with mild viral illness, may offer protection against more severe illness in adulthood.26 To date, hundreds of millions of children have already been infected with COVID-19. For children with immunity from previous infection, the potential benefits of vaccination are likely to be lower than for children without immunity
Ill give Mr. Kraaijeveld credit for using the preferred term post-infection immunity rather than natural immunity, but this, too, is an old antivax argument, namely that natural immunity is better than (or at least as good as) vaccine-induced immunity. Its an argument that I first encountered over 20 years ago, which was when I first started taking a serious interest in the antivaccine movement. Sometimes it got really ridiculous too. Does anyone remember the book Melanies Marvelous Measles 11 years ago? It was a childrens book that argued that measles was not only not harmful but that it was good for children because it built natural immunity. Indeed, its blurb read:
This book takes children aged 4 10 years on a journey of discovering about the ineffectiveness of vaccinations, while teaching them to embrace childhood disease, heal if they get a disease, and build their immune systems naturally.
Actually, measles is worse than we thought in that it causes immune amnesia that suppresses immune memory and makes one susceptible to other infections for 2-3 years. You know why natural immunity isnt better than vaccine-induced immunity? Its because achieving natural immunity requires that one actually suffer through the disease and risk its complications, up to and including death.
I like to ask everyone, including Mr. Kraaijeveld, who argues against routine vaccination of children against COVID-19 because it isnt that dangerous to them: Why arent you arguing against routine vaccination against measles? The death toll among children due to COVID-19 over the last two years (>1,300) translates to a higher yearly death toll than the measles produced in the years right before the vaccine. What about chickenpox, which used to kill only around 100 children a year before the vaccine? Why arent you arguing against the varicella vaccine?
Oh, thats right. Its because the COVID-19 vaccine is supposedly so much more dangerous:
The case for vaccinating healthy children against COVID-19 for their own sake is undermined by uncertainty; that is, by the currently poorly characterized potential for rare, harmful outcomes associated with the vaccines in children. Public safety data from the Pfizer-BioNTech clinical trials in children included 2,260 participants aged 12 to 15, of which 1,131 received the vaccine.37 In addition to a small sample size, the trial follow up period was of short duration; therefore, no reliable data presently exist for rare or longer-term vaccine-related harms.38 Though common adverse events occurring less than 6 months after vaccination may be ruled out, the risks of rare or delayed adverse outcomes can simply not yet be evaluated.39 Should vaccine harms occur, they will be revealed in the general pediatric population only after thousands or millions of children are already vaccinated, which would also risk seriously undermining vaccine confidence. The restriction of AstraZeneca vaccines to older age groups due to blood clotting events early on in the COVID-19 vaccination rollout, as well as reports of increased rates of vaccine-related myocarditis among younger age groups illustrates that rare risks are sometimes more common in younger age groups and might sometimes outweigh benefits in children.40 Severe cardiac manifestations such as myocarditis and pericarditis are now recognized as rare risks of the COVID-19 vaccines.41 Myocarditis-induced deaths following COVID-19 vaccination have been documented in adolescents as well as in adults.42
This is a classic antivax argument, namely that the vaccine is more dangerous than the disease. Of course, if the vaccine truly is more dangerous than the disease, then that is a compelling argument. However, as weve discussed many times (particularly Dr. Howard), this is not the case with COVID-19 vaccines. Even the cases of two adolescent deaths after vaccination cited by Mr. Kraaijeveld are not nearly as clearcut as portrayed, as pediatric cardiologist Dr. Frank Han discussed, noting that dilation of the heart (found in one boy) doesnt occur within days and the autopsy findings were missing some key pieces of information that would definitively suggest the vaccine as the cause.
The speculation about potential long term effects is also a common antivaccine trope. Antivaxxers, failing to be able to make the case that routine childhood vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases that they vaccinated against, often pivot to handwaving about unknown (and undescribed and unproven) long term effects. Before COVID-19, those long term adverse events were autism, autoimmune disease, cancer (still a favorite for COVID-19 vaccines), and pretty much every major chronic illness. (Indeed, antivaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. came up with the false claim that the current generation of children is the sickest generation, largely due toyou guessed it!vaccines.) The last time I dealt with the claim of long term adverse events (i.e., greater than a few weeks to six months after vaccination), I noted that they were very rare, so rare that Paul Thacker, for instance, had to do incredible contortions to find very rare cases that occurred only in the special case of immunosuppressed children and cite narcolepsy after the H1N1 vaccine Pandemrix, which actually occurred within weeks after vaccinationhardly long term.
So this section is basically one antivax argument that the vaccine is more dangerous than the disease. Its not; so Mr. Kraaijevelds ethical argument falls apart. Next up, he appeals to a lack of sterilizing immunity.
The next arguments for vaccination against COVID-19 that Mr. Kraaijeveld takes are all based on the observation that COVID-19 vaccines do not produce sterilizing immunity; i.e., they do not completely prevent infection and transmission, although he does concede that they are quite effective at preventing severe disease, hospitalization, and death. Based on this observation (primarily), he takes on the argument from indirect protection and altruism and the argument from global eradication. Ill start with the latter first, because in its service he makes an argument that caused me, literallyand I do mean literallyto facepalm as I read it. Specifically, he objects to claims that ongoing transmission will:
Mr. Kraaijeveld objects to the first argument by pointing out that evolutionary fitness of an infectious virus is determined more by increased transmissibility rather than virulence, which is true as far as it goes, although he cites a 2020 paper making the argument that there was not yet evidence of SARS-CoV-2 variants with increased transmissibility. (Those would arrive a few months later in the form of the Delta and Omicron variants, the Delta variant being more transmissible than the original Wuhan strain and the Omicron variant being more transmissible than the Delta variant.) Howeverand heres where the facepalm came in as I readthat is actually a strong argument for doing everything reasonable, especially vaccination, to decrease the level of transmission to as low a level as is feasible, in order to decrease the likelihood of more transmissible variants arising. Again, as people making these arguments always seem to do, Mr. Kraaijeveld is falling prey to the Nirvana fallacy, in which an imperfect intervention is portrayed as a useless one. When someone like this argues that COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission, it implies that the vaccines dont prevent infection or transmission at all, which is nonsense. Of course they do; theyre just not 100% effective (or, since the rise of Delta and Omicron even close to it).) The way to look at it is that the vaccines are less good at preventing infection and transmission than they are at preventing serious disease and death, not that they dont prevent transmission or infection at all.
What flows from Mr. Kraaijevelds Nirvana fallacy is predictable. He argues, as I mentioned above, that mass vaccination of children will not contribute to preventing the development of more harmful variants. I note that, even as he observes that virulence and transmissibility are often incorrectly conflated, Mr. Kraaijeveld himself seems to be doing the same thing as he in essence argues against a straw man of the real argument, that decreasing transmission is useful in terms of controlling the disease, even if the vaccines dont produce anything near sterilizing immunity. He also argues:
The notion that unbridled transmission would make the virus more likely to escape vaccine-derived immunity makes the eradication argument either self-defeating or incredibly costly. Aside from the fact that current vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission, if certain variants really are highly efficient at evading vaccine-derived immunityor, worse still, if more variants continuously evolve to evade vaccines more efficientlythen attempts at eradication through global vaccination, and the strong evolutionary selection pressures this entails, will be met with diminishing returns for the costs of such a program.
Its also rather funny how Mr. Kraaijeveld fails to note that these new variants are also pretty good at evading post-infection natural immunity as wellpossibly even as good as they are at evading vaccine-induced immunityto the point where its increasingly being concluded that, while its better to prevent COVID-19 with vaccination, if you do get it hybrid immunity (a combination of infection-induced and vaccine-induced immunity from getting the vaccine after youve recovered) is better at preventing the disease than either alone. I also note that there are few areas in the world where the vaccination rate among adults (much less among children) is anywhere near high enough to result in significant selection for variants that evade the immune response; what we are seeing is primarily a selection for increased transmissibility due to wide and largely uncontrolled circulation of the coronavirus among large populations.
Mr. Kraaijeveld also argues that children are not a major driver of COVID-19 transmission, thus making vaccinating healthy children pointless, because, according to him, COVID-19 is not dangerous to healthy children. One notes that there is more cherry picking here, given that all the studies he cites are pre-Delta and pre-Omicron. Moreover, more recent studies showing that mask mandates significantly decreased transmission suggest that schools are not as insignificant a source of COVID-19 circulation as Mr. Kraaijeveld would argue.
The last part of Mr. Kraaijevelds paper opposes any sort of mandates for COVID-19 vaccines for children that are straight from the antivax playbook. First, the appeal to parental rights:
Mandates for children to be vaccinated against COVID-19 would limit and, depending on their nature, even override the autonomy of parents and guardians to make decisions about the health of their children. This requires ethical justification as such, but it demands stronger justification in proportion to the level of coercion that mandates would involve.100 When mandates are in place, the actors who make decisions for the health and well-being of children de facto become governments and public health officials rather than parents, although less coercive measures (e.g., small fines) might allow some parents to opt out and thereby retain decisional autonomy.101
I have to wonder right here if Mr. Kraaijeveld understands how mandates work for children, in the US at least. Here, the mandate is that children require certain vaccines to attend school, but there is no legal penalty for not vaccinating ones children other than not being allowed to enroll them in school. Certainly, there are no fines, and its pretty rare that parents are investigated by child protective services for not vaccinating their children. (Usually, such investigations involve far more than just not vaccinating.) He also seems unaware that most states allow religious and philosophical exemptions to these mandates, in addition to medical exemptions. In the US, at least, the coercion that he decries isnt much in the way of coercion at all, which makes me wonder why he doesnt think that, in the US at least, mandating COVID-19 vaccines for school is acceptable. Oh, wait. As discussed above, he echoesunknowingly, I hope, but possibly knowingly I fearantivaccine talking points about them, such as the claims that COVID-19 doesnt harm healthy children, that the vaccine is more dangerous than the disease, that it doesnt produce sterilizing immunity and is therefore useless in contributing to herd immunity, and other arguments.
He also goes straight into Great Barrington Declaration/Urgency of Normal territory of focused protection:
For COVID-19, vaccines are safe and effective in higher-risk groups, including older adults and the immunocompromised,59 and significantly reduce the risk of severe illness even when vaccinated groups are exposed to substantial community transmission.60 While there are some people for whom the current COVID-19 vaccines are contraindicated (e.g., those with severe allergies), this group appears to be small.61 It is therefore not the case that vulnerable groups cannot protect themselves, which would make routine vaccination of less vulnerable groupschildren, in this casemore compelling. Moreover, as argued above, children are not major drivers of COVID-19 transmission. As such, there is no strong ethical justification for COVID-19 vaccination of healthy children for the sake of vulnerable groups.
This is, in essence, the same argument that Great Barrington Declaration authors make about all interventions to prevent the spread of COVID-19including masks, lockdowns, and vaccinesnamely that its possible to protect the vulnerable (focused protection) and that no intervention should be permitted that is not completely voluntary. Unsurprisingly, consistent with this Mr. Kraaijeveld is apparently not a fan of nonpharmaceutical interventions, such as masks and lockdowns, to slow the spread of COVID-19 either, viewing them as ethically problematic as well.
To summarize, Mr. Kraaijeveld argues that, because current COVID-19 vaccines do not produce sterilizing immunity, herd immunity is not achievable, and vaccinating children doesnt protect others, nor would vaccinating them prevent the evolution of more harmful and/or immune-evading variants, and, as a result, vaccinating children is not ethically supportable, and vaccine mandates of any kind for COVID-19 are completely unjustifiable from an ethical standpoint. Of course, he fails to mention that most vaccines do not produce sterilizing immunity. Its not as though this hadnt been discussed at the time the vaccines were being rolled out or that scientists hadnt recognized that COVID-19 vaccines were unlikely to produce true sterilizing immunity. Its just plain incorrect to argue that you have to have sterilizing immunity for a vaccine to contribute to herd immunity or even the elimination of a disease. For example, the smallpox vaccine did not produce sterilizing immunity; yet, as has been observed, it was crucial in eradicating smallpox. Neither the Salk (inactivated) nor the Sabin (live attenuated) polio vaccine produces sterilizing immunity, but the global eradication of polio is within reach, thanks to the vaccines:
Also, while were on the topic of polio, it turns out that the same appeal to the disease doesnt kill that many children argument can be made for polio:
One wonders whether Mr. Kraaijeveld similarly questions whether routine polio vaccination is advisable, as well. Just as most of his arguments could be used against routine measles vaccination, similarly most of them could also be used against polio.
Or rotavirus:
The case of rotaviruswhich causes severe vomiting and watery diarrhea and is especially dangerous to infants and young childrenis fairly straightforward. Vaccination limits, but does not stop, the pathogen from replicating. As such, it does not protect against mild disease. By reducing an infected persons viral load, however, it decreases transmission, providing substantial indirect protection. According to the Centers for Disease Control, four to 10 years after the 2006 introduction of a rotavirus vaccine in the U.S., the number of positive tests for the disease fell by as much as 74 to 90 percent.
I mean
In other words, it is not a prerequisite that COVID-19 vaccines prevent transmission completely for them to be very valuable in curbing the pandemic. Moreover, newer generations of COVID-19 vaccines might actually be able to achieve sterilizing immunity. I also note that it has long been a favorite antivaccine argument to cite one vaccine in particular that doesnt provide sterilizing immunity, specifically the pertussis vaccine, whose immunity also wanes with time, like that from COVID-19 vaccines.
While issues of freedom and parental rights are issues of ethics and law about which there will always be some subjectivity based on differing belief systems and about which reasonable people can disagree, accurate science and data are required to have reasonable debates about how much the state should be allowed to infringe upon individual freedom and autonomy as well as parental rights. By massively downplaying the severity of COVID-19 in children in a manner that is, quite frankly, eugenicist in its emphasis on the disease supposedly being pretty close harmless to healthy childrennot to mention based on cherry picked data primarily from before the Delta and Omicron surgesand exaggerating the dangers of the vaccine, Mr. Kraaijeveld, whether he realizes it or not or will admit it or not, tilts the playing field in favor of his arguments in the same intellectually dishonest manner that antivaxxers have long done. He even recycles their arguments, as the way his appeal to the lack of sterilizing immunity due to COVID-19 vaccination and his claim that COVID-19 is close to harmless to most healthy children, both of which are old antivaccine claims used for a number of vaccines in the past, but particularly MMR, rotavirus, and varicella.
All of these reasons are why I now eagerly await Mr. Kraaijevelds next bioethical treatise arguing that we should not routinely vaccinate children against measles because the disease doesnt kill that many kids and that we shouldnt vaccinate against polio, pertussis, and most other childhood diseases because the vaccines dont produce sterilizing immunity and therefore cannot produce herd immunity or contribute to the elimination of the disease. After all, if hes going to recycle, he should go all-in and recycle everything.
Meanwhile, people who like Mr. Kraaijevelds message will go all Humpty Dumpty about words and argue that an article titled Against COVID-19 vaccination of healthy children is not actually arguing against vaccinating children against COVID-19:
Same as it ever was.
