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.
There is no way to determine if deaths were from a vaccine or from a COVID infection when you look at a large group of people. How many kids died from falling down stairs? Did the vaccine cause that?
Prasad is a clown. No mention of exactly how these vaccines caused death. All this is based on shitty data analysis that presumes these children did not have any other underlying cause of death.
of course, back in 2021, Prasad declared COVID vaccines similar to the beginnings of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. He ended his medical career when colleagues outed him:
Bioethicist Arthur L. Caplan said that Prasad’s arguments were specious and ignorant, and science historian Robert N. Proctor said that Prasad was “overplaying the dangers of vaccination mandates and trivializing the genuine harms to liberty posed by 1930s fascism”.
In November 2021, Prasad expressed his opinion that pediatricians should warn parents about risks of COVID immunization such as myocarditis.However, physician Jonathan Howard noted that Prasad was selectively omitting that myocarditis from the vaccine was always mild and that COVID disease itself carried much higher risks, including a worse form of myocarditis.
He was also anti-Mask. Prasad is one of hundreds of examples of how far someone can get with a medical degree that should be nowhere near patients or policy. He is the antithesis of problem-based medicine. Basically the US born version of Andrew Wakefield.
Now he’s so fucked his career in medicine he has no choice but to be RFK’s lackey. But, this is where RFK is getting his information from.