FDA Panelist: Force Vaccine on Kids to See if It’s Safe

BUCK: We gotta talk about covid vaccines for kids ’cause now the FDA advisory committee, right, has recommended this lower dose of Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine for children age 5 to 11. The vote was nearly unanimous: 17 members backing it, one abstention. So that happened in the last 24 hours, and so we got covid vaccine approved for kids.

What do we all think the next step is? Well, of course it’s gonna be making kids get the shot in blue states in particular and maybe some purple states. But this didn’t exactly, Clay… This didn’t make people feel particularly warm and fuzzy about where this is all heading. Here’s a New England Journal of Medicine editor Dr. Rubin, who’s on the FDA panel, who just kind of let something fly that we think everybody should hear.

RUBIN: We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes.

BUCK: Clay, I guess that’s true, but that doesn’t make anybody who’s got kids and questions feel good about this shot.

CLAY: We know beyond a shadow of a doubt, Buck, that kids are not in danger from covid. So you are telling me here that what makes sense going forward is to give kids a vaccine for something that they’re not even sure is going to work at all and that may create grave danger for them? It just doesn’t make logical sense no matter what for young, healthy kids with no issues whatsoever to suddenly have this mandate foisted upon them.

BUCK: I look at the questions that are being asked here, Clay. You see a lot of this at CNN, where they’ll do rhetorical questions that they think, “Oh, it’s so obvious.” He said, no, that’s not obvious at all or I would actually have a completely different answer to the rhetorical question posed. Here is a CNN anchor and reporter on the covid vaccine for kids saying, “Why would you roll the dice with your kids?” You gotta get them the shot to keep them safe.

ELIZABETH COHEN: We know that on social media we see lots of sniping, we see lots of people who are anti-vaccine giving out misinformation when the truth, is yes, children do tend to not get as sick with Covid-19 as adults do, but you never know what’s going to happen if your child gets infected. You never know if your child is going to be one of the ones who, unfortunately, gets sick and dies, so why would you want to roll the dice? You should get your child vaccinated to protect them and to protect the people around them?

BUCK: Lunacy.

ANA CABRERA: More than 700 children have died of covid-19 in this pandemic!

BUCK: Clay —

CLAY: It doesn’t make any sense, Buck. I went back and I just think it’s important for us to keep hammering stories like these about the data. If your kid is between 1 and 4 years old, they are over 10 times as likely to be murdered as they are to die with covid. They are far more likely to drown, to die in a car accident, to die of cancer, to die of heart disease, to die of the seasonal flu, to die via suffocation.

Why in the world are we acting like children in any way are in danger at all from this disease? And look. I wish no kids died for any reason. But the idea that kids are under danger here is a fundamental failure of the American health establishment. I don’t know about you, Buck.

But I recognized all these people out there celebrating this 17-to-nothing verdict from the FDA as if somehow it was going to make their children far safer. Like, who are these people who don’t know the basic data? I think this goes to the point, Buck, of being unable to land the plane. Democrats dialed up fear to such an extent that now they are not able to figure out how to dial it back.

BUCK: And, Clay, this is another one of these moments where you say, “There’s really key data here that is missing.” The same way that I keep pointing out we don’t know how many people in this country have natural immunity. There’s been a clear decision made to undermine and to downplay, I would say, natural immunity as part of this pandemic and the situation around it.

There’s also been a decision, it seems, because they’ll do all these other studies about all these other things. A decision has been made not to tell us. Here’s something we really should know. We have the numbers on child mortality as you point out for covid, and this is not something that any parent should be worried about. This is not something that any parent should say, “Oh, my gosh!”

Unless you happen to have a child who’s severely immunocompromised. But that also would mean that that child is at risk for a whole lot of other things, probably more dangerous to that child than even covid would be. It is true. You can get cut yourself shaving, get a staph infection, and die. That is a true thing that can happen. It’s unlikely in the modern era with antibiotics, but it can happen.

You don’t worry about it. Here’s the data set that’s missing. How much less likely is it for a child to transmit this to an adult? We’ve known from early days of the pandemic that children don’t really transmit it, and what they do is sometimes if there’s any evidence of something, right.? Outdoor transmission is a perfect example.

When there was outdoor transmission in this big study in China, I think they looked at a few thousand people and they found one case of outdoor transmission. “Oh, we can’t… We can’t say you can’t get it outdoors! Gotta wear that mask on the running trail by yourself,” right? Which is lunacy. That’s not how you make policy.

CLAY: Kids couldn’t even play, Buck. Remember they put up…? I think this is going to be one of the moments where people look back on it. They put up crime scene tape, Buck, around children’s playgrounds to keep people from being able to take their kids on swings.

BUCK: They padlock them in New York. They made it so clear. The one thing is, children should have been out in the air. So should the adults, by the way. But you look at this — and we’ve known that children, from the beginning we would say, “They’re at basically no risk and it’s very hard for them to transmit this to adults.” We can look at our… I don’t know. He’s my favorite governor. Can I say your favorite?

I don’t want to speak for you but I think doing the best job on covid is Governor Ron DeSantis, and he’s got the latest data out. It shows that since kids have been in school, there has been this enormous drop-off in covid, the lowest covid rate in the lower 48 states now in Florida. I’ve actually got the tweet: “34 days ago, State Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo signed a rule that empowered Florida parents, eliminated healthy quarantines,” kids that don’t need to be quarantined, “and kept healthy kids in school.”

Now Florida has the lowest covid rate in the nation. Our schools since opening, Clay, have a 34 days ago, State Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo signed a rule that empowered Florida parents, eliminated healthy quarantines, and kept healthy kids in school.

Today, Florida has seen “a 76% decrease in cases since the day the new policy began,” and a 90% decrease in cases since August. The data set that I want to know is: What percentage of cases are child-to-adult transmission? Because they don’t have that. I think it’s because they don’t want people to see that children are basically no risk and don’t really give this to adults.

CLAY: And at this point also, Buck, tons of children have already had covid. So not only are they at low risk, not only are they not primary vectors for the spread of this disease, but many of them have already had covid, and it’s not even spreading inside of schools whether they’re wearing masks or not.