the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is a group of scientific experts (mostly MDs, actually) that develops recommendations for CDC on what people should get what immunizations at what ages and under what circumstances. In order for insurance to cover immunizations, they normally need to be on the recommended schedule. ACIP is currently reviewing the recommendations for Covid-19 vaccination, but secretary Brainworm decided not to wait, and to announce that CDC will no longer recommend the vaccination for pregnant women and children, because he knows better than those "scientists" with their fancy degrees and biostatistics and lah dee dah.
Now, the question regarding children is a bit complicated. Children with healthy immune systems rarely get seriously ill from Covid-19. The rationale for vaccinating them is that they may nevertheless be a vector for infecting others, and that vaccination will reduce replication of the virus in their systems and the extent to which they may contribute to sustaining an outbreak. I don't think we have convincing information about this but on the other hand the vaccine is very safe so why not give it? But I'm willing to leave it up to those fancypants scientists to make their recommendation.
The question regarding pregnant women, however, is not at all complicated. I quote:
The move also puts Kennedy at odds with his new officials at the Food and Drug Administration, who recently said pregnancy was among the underlying conditions that warranted continued eligibility for COVID-19 vaccine approvals. . . .
A statement released by the [American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists] Tuesday voiced frustration with Kennedy's move, warning that COVID infections during pregnancy "can be catastrophic" for families and that "the science has not changed." Joseph said data still shows that pregnant people have an increased risk of severe disease from COVID-19 and are more likely to be hospitalized. She also said newborns have no other way to get protection from the virus, outside of the mother's vaccination.
"Infants are the second leading group of our population being hospitalized. And when we look into those risks, it's really that they're born to moms who haven't received an updated COVID-19 vaccine," said Joseph.
This is madness.
1 comment:
Is there a way to short circuit the misinformation about this and the other canards circulating on the web? I know that many of the purveyors of this rubbish use the mantra "Do your OWN research" knowing that web searches will return a smorgasbord of equally tainted trash. When I search I do often end up with a page that links to the actual study or paper from which the data was gleaned. However, I've been exposed to enough of the academese in which these tracts are written to slog through until I find a table or graph summarizing results in a form I can make some sense of. However, I'm sure it turns off most of the "researchers" who stumble onto them.
I can imagine a much more straightforward document, designed to show up in their search results, that would serve as a gateway to these gnarly papers. It would link to the paper itself but also summarize the important takeaways contained in it. It might reproduce the graphs or tables that folks not mired in the field can still make some sense of. The idea would be that it would present itself as exactly the kind of info that these researchers are looking for. It would also invite them to look at the work which actually located that knowledge. If they chose to follow the link they'd at least have a clue about the objective of the study and would be able to recognize some of its arcane terms, which had already been explained in my fantasy document. Any seeker who gets a sense of what the paper is about should be impressed with the effort, care, and concern for confounding factors or what is still unknown, that went into the study. In some cases we might need to interpolate a page to help our researcher transition from the surface results to their weighty academic target.
A lot of people have a negative picture in their mind, drawn with crayons, about what science is. That makes it easy to be skeptical. I think a lot of science skeptics are honestly looking for truth but are being fed hogwash. Such people might be seduced into taking a harder look when they're seriously searching for truth. They're hungry for the manna of knowledge but just need help locating it.
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