The U.S. Centers for Disease Control's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted on Thursday to "add COVID-19 vaccine to the child immunization schedule." Let's consider some other CDC data, shall we? According to its provisional death counts, children ages 0-17 constitute 0.1% of all COVID deaths in the United States.
The agency doesn't easily break those numbers down any further than that, but if we assume that those deaths are divided evenly between, say 0-9-year-olds and 10-17-year-olds, then children under 10 — i.e., the ones to whom the immunization schedule most implies — constitutes fully 0.05% of all COVID deaths in this country.
Let's be blunt: There is no reason at all, based on these numbers, to give your child the COVID-19 vaccine. Particularly if he is of elementary-school age, his risk of death from the virus itself is so low as to almost constitute a rounding error. We have known for nearly three years at this point that children are at vanishingly little risk of even severe illness from COVID, let alone death. This is just the way it is.
You do not have to do what the CDC says. You do not have to give your child an experimental vaccine for a virus that poses statistically almost no risk to him. You do not have to risk unknown side effects and uncertain health catastrophes because a panel of federal bureaucrats is incapable of even the most low-grade risk analysis. You don't have to do any of these things.
It's true that, things being what they are, this fight may be brought to you anyway. Schools may decide to take up the CDC's "recommendations," making it mandatory for your child to get the jab in order to go to school. But guess what: You don't have to put up with that either. You can organize groups of like-minded parents — there are many, many of them out there — to fight back. You can form coalitions, run for school boards, run for state educational offices. You can wield the threat of major voter blowback if education authorities take the coward's way out and mandate these vaccines. You can use the civic machine to exacting advantage.
If all else fails, you can pull your child out of school. Homeschool him, send him to an alternative school that doesn't require the injection of experimental pharmaceuticals for admission — there are many ways around this, the only limit being how much work you're willing to put into it on behalf of your child.
If you don't want to give your child the COVID vaccine, don't do it. You don't have to. The CDC doesn't make the rules; you're the parent, you do. Reject the ridiculous presumptions of this ridiculous federal bureau.
