The federal, state, and local government responses to COVID-19 did untold damage to businesses, children’s education, and people’s lives. They also set back children’s health in ways that government officials should have anticipated.
The share of kindergarten children with vaccine exemptions has reached an all-time high, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The number ticked up to 3.3% from 3%, which amounts to an additional 80,000 unvaccinated children. Since the start of the pandemic, the share of vaccinated kindergarteners has dropped from 95% to 92.7%. Required kindergarten vaccinations in the United States include chickenpox, measles, mumps, polio, tetanus, and whooping cough.
The CDC also found that, among 2-year-old children, “coverage with nearly all vaccines was lower among children born in 2020 and 2021 than it was among those born in 2018 and 2019, with declines ranging from 1.3 to 7.8 percentage points.” As a result, in March 2024, the U.S. had already seen more measles cases than in the previous four years, the most since the global measles outbreak in 2019. In May 2024, the CDC warned that 2024 was nearly triple the pace ahead of 2023 in whooping cough outbreaks. Chicago was on the receiving end of a chickenpox outbreak fueled by the surge in illegal immigrants.
This is the continuation of the trend revealed in January 2023, when the American Academy of Pediatrics reported a 2% nationwide decline in fully vaccinated kindergarteners, with vaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella hitting their lowest points in the decade.
The decline in vaccinations and the effects of that decline can be directly attributed to the government’s “noble lies” about the COVID vaccine, as well as the implementation of COVID vaccine mandates. The share of people who believe getting their children vaccinated is “extremely” or “very” important dropped from 84% in 2019 to 69% in 2024. The share of parents who say they should be able to choose not to get their children vaccinated has gone up from 16% to 28% over the past four years, with the share of adults saying vaccinations should be required for children to attend public schools dropping from 82% to 70%.
This is the inevitable reaction to the misleading government rhetoric and anti-science government policies that people were subjected to during the pandemic. People were told by prominent government officials such as Dr. Anthony Fauci that they would not get COVID if they got the vaccine. In President Joe Biden’s words, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
These words turned into policy. After all, if no one who got vaccinated could get COVID, no one who got vaccinated could spread COVID. Thus, vaccine mandates were handed down from state and local officials, with Biden attempting to impose a federal one as well. In December 2021, 12 million people were living under vaccine mandates, with tens of thousands losing their jobs, according to the New York Times.
These restrictions were foisted on children as well. High school athletes were forced to wear ankle monitors. California and Illinois imposed vaccine mandates on children of certain ages to go to school. New York City imposed vaccine mandates on children to be able to go to restaurants.
All of it was for naught. By December 2021, it was clear that vaccinated people were spreading COVID at the same rate as the unvaccinated. Dr. Deborah Birx admitted health officials oversold the vaccine and that they knew it would not prevent infection, showing that government health officials were perfectly willing to use “the science” as a way of manipulating the public and justifying unnecessary authoritarian policies that were imposed on people.
This was even worse for children. Simply put, children were never at serious risk from COVID. From March 2020 to September 2023, the CDC recorded 1,696 COVID-related deaths among children. Remember, not all COVID-related deaths were deaths caused by COVID, simply deaths among patients who also had COVID. That is about 41 COVID-related deaths per month. Meanwhile, the CDC estimated during the 2018-19 flu season that 480 children died in that seven-month period. That is an average of more than 68 flu deaths per month.
Do you remember when flu vaccines were made mandatory for children to play soccer or eat chicken strips in a restaurant booth? That was never the case, and then government health officials and politicians decided that COVID vaccines must be mandatory for those same children despite being at much less risk.
In fact, the anti-science policies certainly hurt children more than they helped. The COVID lockdowns led to declines in academic scores, increases in depression symptoms, and decreases in social activity. Just as importantly, though, mandatory vaccines for children actually put children at risk from COVID in another way. Preventing children who did not receive the COVID vaccine from athletics exiled them to inactivity. The biggest at-risk group for COVID other than the elderly was the obese. The CDC found that 78% of people hospitalized for COVID were either overweight or obese.
The normal, everyday people who did not pore over this data were no less aware of the reality. They knew that children were not at serious risk of the virus. They knew the COVID vaccine did not prevent them from getting the virus, likely after they got infected despite being vaccinated. Whether they knew what the data said or not, these people knew that government health officials were either lying or wrong about what exactly the COVID vaccine did and that their government leaders imposed burdensome restrictions on them and their children based on that inaccurate information.
Naturally, many of those people who lived through that “misinformation,” while people who offered alternative perspectives were treated as heretics of the mighty “science,” will come to question the efficacy of other vaccines, as well as the government policies that mandate or encourage those vaccines for children to attend public schools. That trust in vaccines that had been built over decades of efficacy was destroyed for many over just a few years by public health officials and politicians who wanted to manipulate them “for their own good.”
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Fauci, Biden, and others cashed in that trust for short-term political benefits in defiance of every data point about COVID, the flu, and children. People’s lives were ruined, their jobs taken from them first by a lockdown and then by a vaccine mandate. Children’s lives were ruined, with them being locked out of schools, sports, and restaurants. People were told this was because they needed to be vaccinated to protect themselves and others from infection, and it turned out to be wrong.
The decisions made by this shortsighted “leadership” did not solve the crisis that it was supposed to solve. Instead, it has made people, especially children, less safe. If this vaccination decline continues, and outbreaks of diseases previously considered under control follow, the government health bureaucrats who abused their authority and trust during the pandemic will have no one to blame but themselves. No amount of shaming or chest-thumping about how they represent “the science” will reverse the years of damage they did to public health attitudes across the country.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
