It is a matter of scientific record that Covid 19 poses next to no threat to children, or young adults.
It is also a matter of scientific record that the Covid 19 vaccines, while effective at reducing your chances of death or severe illness (good enough for me), are not particularly effective at stopping the transmission of Covid 19.
Yet, in Ireland, we are now preventing unvaccinated children from playing indoor sports. There is talk of a massive vaccination campaign for children. Public and political opposition to this, with the honourable exception of Peadar Toibin, is muted at best.
The irony, of course, is that this latest burst of enthusiasm for the vaccines comes as evidence increases that the vaccines have not worked as well as might be hoped. Do not take my word for that – take the word of Tony Holohan, who said as much himself:
Vaccinations are “not performing as well as hoped” in reducing the transmission of Covid-19, the chief medical officer has said.
Dr Tony Holohan said Ireland’s high vaccination rate has prevented thousands of hospital admissions, as well as hundreds of ICU admissions and deaths.
However, he said vaccinations on their own were not enough to stop the spread of the disease, and urged the public to stick to the basic measures of hand washing, mask wearing and isolating if they have symptoms.
It should be said here – though it will of course, and as usual, annoy some readers – that if the vaccines were proven to stop the spread of Covid 19, then the case for vaccinating children would be logical and convincing. If your aim is to stop the illness circulating in the community, and you have a way to do that through vaccination, then doing it makes sense.
But vaccines are not a tool, in that case, that can accomplish that goal. The very best that they can do is to reduce severe illness and hospitalisation.
But children are basically not at risk of severe illness and hospitalisation. In fact, if you compare the United States figures on Covid to their figures in the last pre-Covid flu season, you will find that more American children were hospitalised and died from the flu in 2018-19 than have been hospitalised with Covid 19 in total. For that agegroup, the figures say, Covid is less serious than the flu.
The only circumstances, then, in which a mass vaccination effort is justified in that agegroup is if such an intervention could convincingly be said to eliminate the risk contagious children pose to those who are in at-risk groups. But that cannot be said.
What we are seeing here is not rational. It is not, especially, scientific. Much of the demand for vaccines for children is not in fact coming from scientists, but from concerned covid-hyper cautious parents and politicians, who neither understand the risks posed by the illness, nor much care to find out.
The other problem, of course, is that the political incentives have changed. You will remember, if you have lived through the last two years, that for basically all of 2020 and most of 2021, the mantra was that “schools are safe”, and that the spread of covid amongst children was not a problem. Now, with cases rising, and politicians being required to be seen to do something, anything, on the matter, “schools are safe” is out the window, and “vaccinate the children” is in.
When you think about it for any longer than about two minutes, you should realise that if vaccinating children was an urgent requirement, it would have made sense to vaccinate them at the very beginning of the vaccine programme, not at the very end. After all, most of us, in the early part of the year, were under lockdown. We were not mingling – at least, not to anywhere near the extent that children were. If vaccinating children was an effective intervention, and delivered real benefits, there is a strong argument that they should have been the first to be jabbed, not the last.
But none of this is about logic at all.
The difficulty here is that Ireland is rapidly devolving into a kind of public covid madness, where people are now openly talking about the need to “save Christmas” – as if the season was in danger from anything other than their own fears.
What we have, as I wrote the other day, is a situation where Covid is nowhere near as lethal an illness as it was in early 2020, and where children in particular barely suffer from it at all. The drive to vaccinate children is a symptom of a country that has lost any sense of proportionality, and is instead resorting to fighting phantoms, and swinging wildly in panic against an attacker that, in this case, is not really there.
It’s gone past the point of hysteria, in truth.