The Flimsy Evidence Behind the CDC’s Push to Vaccinate Children

A tremendous number of government and private policies affecting kids are based on one number: 335. That is how many children under 18 have died with a Covid diagnosis code in their record, according to the CDC.

Without these data, the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices decided in May that the benefits of two-dose vaccination outweigh the risks for all kids 12 to 15. I’ve written hundreds of peer-reviewed medical studies, and I can think of no journal editor who would accept the claim that 335 deaths resulted from a virus without data to indicate if the virus was incidental or causal, and without an analysis of relevant risk factors such as obesity.

My research team at Johns Hopkins worked with the nonprofit FAIR Health to analyze approximately 48,000 children under 18 diagnosed with Covid in health-insurance data from April to August 2020. Our report found a mortality rate of zero among children without a pre-existing medical condition such as leukemia.

The National Education Association has been debating whether to urge schools to require vaccination before returning to school in person. How can they or anyone debate the issue without the right data?

Organizations and politicians who are eager to get every living American vaccinated are following the CDC without understanding the limitations of the methodology. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky claimed that vaccinating a million adolescent kids would prevent 200 hospitalizations and one death over four months. But the agency’s Covid adolescent hospitalization report, like its death count, doesn’t distinguish on the website whether a child is hospitalized for Covid or with Covid. The subsequent Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of that analysis revealed that 45.7% “were hospitalized for reasons that might not have been primarily related” to Covid-19.

I look for stats that combat the excessive all-ages and condition Covid response, but try to find the actual source for claims, and what research shows (https://vaxopedia.org/2021/07/23/did-a-johns-hopkins-study-find-zero-deaths-among-healthy-kids/) is that,

Unlike a CDC study which found that 25% of children who died with COVID had no pre-existing conditions among 121 deaths, as Jonathan Howard points out, Makary’s report only included three children who died!

Although Marty Makary, MD, MPH, the author, is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, that doesn’t make this a Johns Hopkins study. Instead, what these folks are talking about is a ~~study~~ report, Risk Factors for COVID-19 Mortality among Privately Insured Patients, that was ~~published~~ posted by FAIR Health, the West Health Institute, and Marty Makary, a Surgical Oncologist and Fox News medical contributor. What did his report find?

As Johnathan Howard found, the Marty Makary report included only three children who had a pre-existing condition and died of COVID.

Marty Makary, who had predicted we would reach herd immunity levels of COVID protection by last April, has made grand claims for his report, saying it is evidence that COVID only kills kids with pre-existing conditions, like leukemia.

While he has been going so far as to try and use it to influence our childhood COVID vaccination strategy, it is very important to note that it is based on a very tiny dataset.

Marty Makary's report was not published in a peer reviewed medical journal.

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That said, as I found, As of Nov. 18 (as well as at the original time of this writing on 12/10/21), the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) — which is the percentage of Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. out of the total number of cases — is 1.6%, and which includes all people of all ages and conditions. Based on statistics from between the beginning of January 2020 until December 8, 2021,the CFR for those aged 0-17 calculates (Y is what % of X) to 0.01% (644 deaths out of 6,310,536 cases); and for those aged 18-29 the CFR is 0.05% (4,700 deaths out of 8,667,566 cases); for ages 30-39 it is 0.21% (13,882 deaths out of 6,697,096 cases); for ages 40-49 it is 0.58% (33,706 deaths out of 5,832,777 cases); for ages 50-64 it is 1.88% (145,247 deaths out of 7,717,656 cases); but for the ages of 65-74 it jumps to 6.21% (178,912 deaths out of 2,880,341 cases); and for the combined ages of 75 and all those who are older then it leaps to 18.43% (411,177 deaths out of 2,231,117 cases). Sources: Statista; CDC on 12/10/21.

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