I'm not saying there _aren't_ problems with decision-making or guidance from our public health agencies, but this article uses really different standards for judging positions taken by those agencies than it does for any dissenting position, in a way that ends up being nonsensical.<p>Sure, let's critically evaluate the guidance put forward by our public health institutions, but quoting a statement from Norway's equivalent institution without the backing evidence doesn't make the US "wrong". If the evidence available on the efficacy of vaccines for kids is so ridiculously wide that it goes from -99% to +370% risk of infection, then surely Norway is _also_ drastically overstating its case when it says (about kids) "previous infection offers as good of protection as the vaccine against reinfection" esp since it _also_ seems like the protective effect of prior infection is both uncertain and changing.<p>How about flatly declaring that guidance was "wrong" about school closures because minority and poor kids did markedly worse at math? Obviously these decisions are complex trade-offs, and one can't conclude that the choice was "wrong" simply by pointing out one of the costs.<p>How about quoting a CDC scientist, who cannot possibly have strong evidence when making the prediction "CDC guidance worsened racial equity for generations to come. It failed this generation of children." Generations to come? Show us the data that lets this scientist predict the far future with such confidence.<p>I get that it's deeply unnerving when these institutions make sweeping recommendations based on less firm data than we would normally demand. But not recommending anything, or not taking decisive action because of the limited data would _also_ have been irresponsible. When schools first closed, we didn't know a lot of things, but it would have been pretty reckless if agencies said "well this is putting a lot of people in the hospital and spreading fast, but we don't have the data to give definitive guidance yet, so you're on your own. Depending on the range of things your communities choose, maybe in a few months we'll have the evidence to say something."
I have no idea if this is a valid article, the use of so many anonymous sources made me doubt every word. For all I know they are quoting someone on reddit claiming to work for the cdc. Every quote could have just been made up. It very much just appears to be opinion pretending to be news.<p>With that said, I do agree with the proposal that if a kid has already had covid then why vaccinate them if the general consensus is that the vaccines only provide limited protection for a few months. All for vaccinating high risk people and I am vaccinated against covid with a booster from when they first came out but will not get another booster now that I have already had Covid. Omicron in general for most people is no worse than the flu, unpleasant but bearable. I fully understand the rush to vaccinate adults in the beginning when Delta was raging and we had limited understanding of the virus. Luckily Omicron is dominant now it seems to be much less damaging. This is not to downplay the very real consequences and deaths that do occur still from Covid. At this point in time my whole family has had it and I have accepted it as endemic and moved on.
The arguments they make regarding children's vaccines don't make much sense to me. The end target for the pediatric vaccine trials was immunobridging, which has widely been used for other common childhood vaccines. Are they arguing against those as well? If so, that goes against a widely accepted and validated strategy to bridge adult vaccines down to pediatric age groups. Efficacy is a very complicated thing to measure as variants change. The symptomatic disease efficacy seen for the pediatric trials compare well vs. Omicron to what we've seen for adults, so it's all consistent and makes sense. Also, would they argue against the annual flu shots? We don't even run efficacy trials for those every year for different strain compositions.<p>Also, a bit of perspective: we vaccinate children for many illnesses that would result in comparatively "small" numbers of pediatric deaths (lower than Covid even!). The reason is that even rare pediatric deaths, if preventable, are terrible given the life-years lost. And there HAVE been FAR too many pediatric Covid deaths by our modern standards for pediatric infectious diseases. If Covid only affected kids, the absolute numbers of deaths would be a very worrisome thing. Second, the possibility of long-term complications from even non-fatal illnesses. For pediatric COVID, MIS-C and potential super antigen links to the recent spread of pediatric hepatitis are more than sufficient to meet that bar.<p>Finally - there was no safety signal seen in the 5-12 year old pediatric vaccines that have been given out to millions for ~year already, and no signal in the under 5 trials as well. The myocarditis risk primarily seems in teenage and older groups and linked to puberty/adolescent hormones.<p>There may be contrarian voices in the FDA and CDC as there will be in any large organization. But to believe their voices over the consensus requires a heavy dose of motivated reasoning and not engaging with some basic facts about the goals of pediatric vaccines and the ways vaccine trials work. There's a reason every pediatrician parent I know was first in line to get their kids vaccinated.
> "That particular FDA doctor was referring to two recent developments inside the agency. First, how, with no solid clinical data, the agency authorized Covid vaccines for infants and toddlers, including those who already had Covid. And second, the fact that just months before, the FDA bypassed their external experts to authorize booster shots for young children."<p>> "Why are they embarrassed? In short, bad science.<p>The longer answer: that the heads of their agencies are using weak or flawed data to make critically important public health decisions. That such decisions are being driven by what’s politically palatable to people in Washington or to the Biden administration. And that they have a myopic focus on one virus instead of overall health."<p>So can we finally stop blaming the general public for the ongoing narrative that simply doesn't pass the smell test?<p>Meanwhile, in Brazil, two doctors are trying to invent their own mRNA vax. And if they do they're promising to give it away...because The First World Healthcare Industrial Complex is more concerned about money over saving lives? And the media and political powers are silent?<p>Too much of the past couple+ years has been a shit show. If it's not negligence then it's intentional. Neither is good.
The sources this article cites regarding masking is a single pre-print that hasn't been peer reviewed yet, and it cites no sources at all for the claim that<p>| "Then they ignored natural immunity. Wrong again. The vast majority of children have already had Covid, but this has made no difference in the blanket mandates for childhood vaccines. And now, by mandating vaccines and boosters for young healthy people, with no strong supporting data, these agencies are only further eroding public trust."
The main problem here is that Public health agencies are refusing to admit they are / were wrong in certain cases causing all political non sense.
The second problem is that public healt official ended relying too much on mandates/enforcements and way too little on propaganda.<p>For example, it is obvious now that vaccines do not prevent one from getting COVID and spreading COVID. Yes - vaccines definitely make having COVID like a mild fly: I got it just now and I was just a little sick for a couple of days.<p>But they still claim that vaccines are preventing the spread.<p>And then the approach is really bad: instead of running “viagra style” commercials on TV for vaccinations they decided to go with heavy handed mandates and requirements. I bet a couple of Steph Curry and Tom Brady commercials about vaccination will do wonder.
The one thing that struck me about Covid and the response was the western world rock bottom levels of trust in their governments (broadly defined).<p>To me that's the real story - the demonstration of what amounts to a loss of legitimacy.<p>(FWIW shutdowns did not bother me much, I got the two mandatory vaccines my jurisdiction required for air travel but refused the boosters, I generally wear masks in public because better safe than sorry.)
I think OP missed the fact that clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines in children measured neutralizing antibodies as the surrogate endpoint, similar to clinical trials for other vaccines [1]. So it is not surprising that the trials could achieve their primary endpoint while being inconclusive on preventing infection. On top of that, the benefit of vaccination can arise not just from preventing infection but also from reducing disease severity.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.fda.gov/drugs/development-resources/table-surrogate-endpoints-were-basis-drug-approval-or-licensure" rel="nofollow">https://www.fda.gov/drugs/development-resources/table-surrog...</a> "Table of Surrogate Endpoints That Were the Basis of Drug Approval or Licensure"
I don’t really have a problem with making boosters available.<p>Closing schools and masks have been gone in my area has been over for a while so the article seems to be mixing timelines in a way that is hard to follow.
Yes, like the people wearing double-masks outside walking their dogs still (Seattle). The CDC _never_ said wearing a mask outside is useful, and never said that people are catching it outdoors. So I don't know where the "idea" came that wearing a mask outside is "better" than not. It's just probably paranoia at this point (and looking like a "good person") and has nothing to do with infection control.
One of the authors tweeted this:<p>"The rest of the world has accepted the endemic nature of Covid and moved on, but the U.S. is an int'l outlier, still pushing mass testing & chasing down every case." [0]<p>I'm not sure what inverse universe he lives in given that we barely do any official testing, and contact tracing never even got off the ground.<p>His retweets are also all the other well known covid-minimizers - including the infamous Jay Bhattacharya.<p>[0] <a href="https://twitter.com/MartyMakary/status/1546533258187390977" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/MartyMakary/status/1546533258187390977</a>
Despite this tech companies are still requiring vaccines to come work in person, yet are wondering why no one wants to go back...<p>Testing is way safer at this point than two doses against a strain that hasn't been dominant since late 2020. Lots of people are getting sick anyways even if they are vaccinated from other strains they aren't protected against, yet we discriminate against anyone who decided not to get the shot for religious reasons, or who can't get it for medical reasons.<p>The world will look back on these years as collective insanity.
> One CDC scientist told us about her shame and frustration about what happened to American children during the pandemic: “CDC failed to balance the risks of Covid with other risks that come from closing schools,” she said. “Learning loss, mental health exacerbations were obvious early on and those worsened as the guidance insisted on keeping schools virtual. CDC guidance worsened racial equity for generations to come. It failed this generation of children.”
Regardless of what side of the fence you sit on, the least we should see is public health agencies take a position that we are smarter than we were when this whole thing started and start to think about a guiding policy for the long term. Many large companies the size of small countries have already adjusted their policies for the long term. Is that what we have to come to expect in the world that our working environments are ahead of our public health agencies?
Frustration is an emotion which seems to be ever increasing against a monolith that is the internet, where your voice doesn't feel like it matters, because you can't see the reaction of anyone.
This is a really biased article pushing a particular viewpoint. If it wasn't, you would also include the studies the demonstrate the number of lives saved by lockdowns that happened, the impact of different levels and types of lockdowns etc.<p>A good summary with links is here: <a href="https://www.the-scientist.com/features/counting-the-lives-saved-by-lockdownsand-lost-to-slow-action-67689" rel="nofollow">https://www.the-scientist.com/features/counting-the-lives-sa...</a>
Please consider the source. These authors are health care officials working for Rick Scott (Republican governor of Florida) and Glenn Youngkin (Republican governor of Virginia), both of whom have a hard political stance downplaying COVID.
> In this, the leaders of these American health agencies made the U.S. an international outlier in how it treats children. Sweden never offered vaccination to children under 12. Finland limits Covid vaccines to children under 12 who are at high risk. The Norwegian Institute of Public Health has appropriately stated that “some children may benefit” but “previous infection offers as good of protection as the vaccine against reinfection.” Denmark announced on June 22 that its recommendation to vaccinate any children under age 16 was a mistake.
My impression working with a couple pubilic health agencies over the last half decade or so is that they are considered effectively "rogue" by the institutions they are accountable to, they operate as surveillance organizations with the same kind of secrecy culture as intelligence work, their management staff revolve in and out from international NGOs and univeristy admins, they treat privacy laws and policy with contempt, epidemiologists aren't doctors or biologists but "social scientists" with a particular critical bent, and they are very concerned about being held accountable for the policies they have influenced and executed because they know what they tried to do.<p>Mostly, they are good people wanting to do good work, but imo, public health agencies have become a para-intelligence services with explicitly political aims. There is a network of academics who see health and health information as a policy lever, and they have been out in force leveraging it through public health agencies during the pandemic.<p>I think they have discredited themselves over travel bans, vax passports, the objectively insane and poisonous rhetoric about the "hesitant," and arbitrary mandates with no accountability for those who enforced them. I don't think they can be trusted to be arbiters of science for people with a basic statistical reasoning skills and a belief in the existence of truth. The article articulates a more general and relevant sentiment, which is that the medical establishment has forfeited its public trust.
Anyone who unironically prefixes "science" with "the" doesn't understand science. The scientific method is pretty much the opposite of ten commandments inscribed in stone.
For a second there I thought this was an actual news organization's article, but actually it's a blog. Kind of funny how neither cites sources for claims, tho. "Honest news for sane people" indeed.
I've never heard of "commonsense.news" before, but it is by Bari Weiss[0] who is trying to create an "anti-cancel culture," "anti-woke" University called the University of Austin[1]. Her Wikipedia on her history kind of speaks for itself, in particular the "2017–2020" section[0].<p>Why does this matter? Because most of the articles claims are based on "spoke to us" quotes from anonymous staffers which cannot be independently verified. So it falls to the reputation of those publishing and their journalistic integrity/process, and at that point I leave it to you to make up your own mind.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bari_Weiss#2017%E2%80%932020:_The_New_York_Times" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bari_Weiss#2017%E2%80%932020:_...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin</a>
The problem is that the people making these decisions are <i>terrified</i>. Indeed, the people who <i>ought</i> to have made the most careful study of COVID, act most terrified of it. So, either the terror is the result of careful, inadequately disclosed study of the virus, or these agencies are unable to curb the desperation of voters and politicians to do <i>something</i>, <i>anything</i> to protect themselves and their loved ones from something that was seriously overhyped from the start.