Denial only serves the aims of anti-vaxxers.
On the Friday after Thanksgiving, Vinay Prasad, the FDA’s top vaccine regulator, made a claim that shocked the public-health establishment. “For the first time,” he wrote in a leaked email to his staff, “the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children.” The agency had supposedly identified at least 10 children who died from getting COVID shots.
To say the email was poorly received by vaccine experts and physicians would be an understatement. Prasad’s claim provoked a rapid series of rebuttals. A response from 12 former FDA commissioners, published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, called Prasad’s memo “a threat to evidence-based vaccine policy and public health security.” All of the potential vaccine-related deaths reported to the government, presumably including those to which Prasad referred, had already been reviewed by the agency’s staff, the former commissioners wrote, and “different conclusions” had been reached.
Elsewhere, doctors and scientists declared that absolutely no evidence links COVID-19 vaccines to death in children; and that in order to suggest otherwise, Prasad and his colleagues had engaged in an “evidence-manufacturing mission,” a “dumpster dive” for shoddy data, or—worse—a campaign of lying.
Prasad is among the public-health officials who, under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have been systematically undermining the nation’s confidence in immunizations. Prasad has not yet offered up any documentation to support his assertion, and his count of vaccine-related deaths may well turn out to be inflated. The memo’s overheated rhetoric and lengthy recitation of political grievances also raise some doubts about his claims.
Yet there’s something troubling—and telling—in the fact that his memo has provoked people to deny even the possibility of COVID-vaccine-related deaths. The idea that mRNA-based shots have, tragically, killed a very small number of children is not far-fetched. It also doesn’t imply a catastrophic threat to public health, given that tens of millions of doses of these vaccines have safely been given out to young people. From the start of the coronavirus pandemic, lack of nuance has been a problem with public-health messaging—one that anti-vaccine advocates have made use of to great effect. Now, in a moment when public health in America is under existential threat, this insistence that no evidence exists for vaccine-related deaths risks adding to the crisis.
“Some Children May Have Died”
Then provides no solid evidence that any of the purported deaths were from the vaccine. Claims scientists have to allow for the possibility when every case was examined and no conclusive evidence was found to link the vaccine with the deaths.
What’s next? Geographers have to be open to the possibility that the earth is flat? Physicists should allow for the chance that perpetual motion is possible? Atheists really should say their prayers, you know, just in case?
The Atlantic really likes to ride that centrist rail.
Actually, it’s even worse than that, the FDA clown is saying some children have died, not may have. The author just ignores all of that to so he can get on his “you ivory tower academics are too close minded!” soap box.
And also no mechanism of how the vaccine could have caused death. This quack is an example of anti-evidence based medicine, the idea that medicine should only be driven by opinion, not evidence and proof.
Doctors are not scientists.
I was with you until this. Doctors are scientists. That doesn’t mean all of them are good scientists. Some, like Vinay Prasad, are bad scientists and bad doctors—he’s more podcaster and political hack than doctor.
Most medical research is done by MDs. Even doctors that are purely clinicians have extensive scientific training. It’s absurd to say, “doctors are not scientists.”