Dr. Wen: Don’t Vaccinate Kids Under 5 Until It’s Safe

BUCK: Here is Leana Wen — among the favorite blue check docs over at CNN, while there still is a CNN — who is saying something interesting here about vaccines for kids under 5. Play 7.

WEN: Well, I’m ambivalent right now, John, which is not something that I ever thought I would say (chuckles) about vaccines for under 5-year-olds. I’m the mom of two little kids under 5. I can’t wait until they are vaccinated. But I would wait until we find that the vaccines are safe and effective, and I’m not sure that we can say that at the moment because we just don’t have the data.

Now, I definitely understand the urgency that many parents are feeling, and I can also understand the point of view that, “Hey, if three doses are being studied and two doses will give you some level of protection and the vaccine is safe, then why not give it?” Maybe some parents will make that choice. But I also think that other parents would want to wait until we know that three doses will produce the intended effect.

BUCK: Gotta wait ’til three doses, Clay?

CLAY: Well, first of all, I give Leana Wen some small measure of credit for saying that the data doesn’t reflect that it works on kids under 5. Where I give her no credit is in the fact that these days kids are under zero — almost statistically zero — danger from covid. I just keep hammering this home because I know our audience hears it, but I want…

Maybe you grab this segment from the podcast, and you share with it your friend and you say, “Hey, go look up the data. This is actually true.” Your kids, if you took your kids to school today, which I did, I took my fifth grader and my first grader to school, I’ll probably pick ’em up at the end of the day today too. My kids are under more danger of dying riding to and from school with me in a car than they are from covid.

My kids are under more danger of being murdered than they are of dying with covid. My kids are under more danger of drowning, and my kids are under — really, on average — more statistical danger from the seasonal flu than they are from covid. I bring all of that up to say, “Who are these parents and how are they so poorly informed that they believe that their kids who are 5 years old and younger need to be given an experimental vaccine for a virus that poses them no risk?

Which, by the way, Buck, a huge percentage of them have already had. We know the percentage of kids that have had covid is monstrous just based on how Omicron has rolled through, but also based on Alpha and the Delta and all the other variants. This idea that kids don’t already have antibodies to covid is mostly untrue for the vast majority of them.

BUCK: And yet they’re marching along with this, and there is this fixation on getting children vaccinated. What has been done to kids during the pandemic in so many ways is, I think, the most inexcusable aspect of Fauciism because they have no say in this, as we know. The adults make all the decisions for them.

And what we see are a lot of neurotic and virtue-signaling people who themselves are, of course, much greater risk of any covid complication or issue walking around without masks on, indoors, outdoors, masking up their kids, fixated on this. I mean, I think I saw CNN — while they’re still a CNN — Jake Tapper saying that opening schools… We had the sound bite on the sheet yesterday.

We didn’t use it, but opening schools before kids are vaccinated, like, why should we do that, something to that effect. I’m sitting here saying, every infectious disease doc that I know — and I know a bunch of them. I have friends who are a number of them and obviously more have been reaching out to me, Clay, since we’ve been doing this show. They all say the same thing: There is no basis for mandating vaccines for children — that’s completely outer-world lunacy and that’s completely nuts — and really there’s — they wouldn’t encourage any parents to get their kids vaccinated, unless there’s a very specific circumstance of lack of immunity.

CLAY: You want some entertainment? I don’t think you’ve heard this, Buck. We actually Geraldo — and if you’d told me that I was ever gonna get in an argument with Geraldo in my life when I was like 10 years old watching the Geraldo Rivera Show during school breaks. Listen to me and Geraldo right here go at it over this exact issue.

CLAY: Spicy.

BUCK: You gotta… You know, if you’re gonna be a TV news guy, you gotta have a fight with Geraldo at some point, right? You know, you’re gonna… By the way, another guy, I will say this, everyone says super nice guy. Everyone says Geraldo’s a super nice guy.

CLAY: I’ve worked with at Fox and I’ve gotten along with him. Geraldo was just wrong there. I had to tell him.

BUCK: Yeah, you gotta lay it down.