Willie R. Tubbs, FISM News

[elfsight_social_share_buttons id=”1″]

Though Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo shared a stage with Gov. Ron DeSantis and a cadre of doctors and epidemiologists, he alone captured all the headlines by announcing Florida would recommend against COVID-19 vaccination for healthy children.

On Monday, toward the end of a roundtable discussion about worldwide response to COVID, Ladapo shared that Florida was “going to be the first state to officially recommend against the COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children.”

Ladapo did not further expand on this thought, and he did not explain what would constitute a healthy child. The announcement, though, does come soon after a recent study showed that the vaccine has proven to provide limited protection in children ages 5-12. 

The statement runs counter to current guidance from the Centers for Disease Control, which recommends children 5 and older be vaccinated, and the Biden White House almost immediately rejected the idea.

“Let me just note that we know the science, we know the data and what works and … what the most effective steps are in protecting people of a range of ages from hospitalization and even death,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said during her Monday press briefing. “The FDA and CDC have already weighed in … on the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines for those [5] and older.  The recommendations are vetted transparently through a process … with a purpose so that parents can have confidence, after consulting with their pediatricians or doctors if they would like, about the safety.”

Psaki also called it, “deeply disturbing that there are politicians peddling conspiracy theories out there and casting doubt on vaccinations when it is our best tool against the virus and the best tool to prevent even teenagers from being hospitalized.”

DeSantis, though, said the results favor Florida’s approach, which was far less strict than in other parts of the country.

“Over the past two years, the data has shown us what works and what doesn’t work,” DeSantis said. “It is long past time to stop the COVID theater. In Florida, we told the truth, we let the data drive our response, and we let Floridians make decisions for themselves and their children. As a result, Florida is in a better spot than states who used fear mongering and mandates.”

Among the experts gathered for the roundtable were Doctors Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya, the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, in which they called for “focused protection” rather than widespread lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

The primary tenets of the Great Barrington Declaration are preventing the most vulnerable members of society from exposure to COVID-19, limiting restrictions for the general public, and reaching a goal of herd immunity.

“If you have had immunity, you don’t need vaccines, and that by itself sort of reduces any argument for having a vaccine mandate or vaccine passports,” Kulldorff said. “But for children who haven’t had COVID, the question was, we don’t know to what extent it helps, up against death and serious disease. Right now in the U.S., the Omicron wave is going down. Right now I think the benefits of vaccinating children are very small. We know that there’s a risk of myocarditis for young boys and young men, but also for girls. There might be other adverse reactions that we don’t know about yet. So for children, the benefits we know are at best, very small and we don’t know what the risk benefit ratio is. I think under those circumstances, it’s unethical to mandate vaccinations for children.”