Political pressure to vaccinate young children is unscientific and counterproductive

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s formal recommendation that children ages 5-11 receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has some parents feeling relief and others feeling anxious and suspicious. This recommendation was made based on the evidence for the vaccine; however, the ultimate decision of whether children actually receive the vaccine is, and should lie, with the parents. 

Many, including my wife and I, may choose to have their children vaccinated. As a parent, it is my responsibility to make that decision based on the facts, which show us many things but do not show us that children are at significant risk of falling seriously ill or dying from COVID. Parents should be allowed to contemplate the decision to vaccinate their children without political pressures that fail to adequately scrutinize the science, something that is becoming increasingly more difficult.

It first must be acknowledged that all illnesses are cause for concern, and all deaths, especially of children, are tragic and to be mourned. To the detriment of sound medical analysis, the campaign for mandatory, total and unanimous vaccination has become a political football used by officials and elected politicians to demonstrate their competence and imbue themselves with an aura of compassion and sophistication. The approval to vaccinate children ages 5-11 has led some to call for mandatory COVID vaccinations for our kids. 

Operation Warp Speed, an effort I was intimately involved in during my time as deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, produced life-saving vaccines that altered the course of the pandemic. This operation yielded COVID vaccination shots in record time to protect vulnerable populations, reopen the economy, and restore our lives to normalcy. 

When we are deciding what to do about vaccination as parents and guardians, we must keep in mind all of the risks, from COVID and all other factors. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s own data shows that children ages 5-11 are one of the age groups least at-risk from COVID. They represent the fourth-lowest number of cases and just 0.028 percent of deaths from COVID, the second-lowest share of any age group, just after the cohort of ages 16-17.

This is not to be interpreted that we should advocate against vaccinating children, yet the facts tell us that children are not statistically at risk from the disease. Using inflammatory language to imply that children are among the groups seriously at risk is innumerate and false. In fact, the inaccurate assessment that COVID threatens the lives of children may lead to a genuinely dangerous devaluation of inoculation against other diseases within the childhood vaccine schedule. As pediatric and primary care offices closed down during the pandemic, up-to-date status for all recommended vaccines declined from approximately two-thirds of children to fewer than half. These vaccines include inoculations against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) and diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus (DTP) — both of which protect children from conditions that pose greater health risks to children than COVID-19. 

Coercing populations who are not at risk of serious illness to take the vaccine, while sacrificing progress on other, more dangerous illnesses would be a mistake. The vaccine offers some families assurances that children can spend time with their grandparents over the holidays, go to class without wearing masks or socially distancing and take part in social activities among friends whose underlying health conditions might make them more susceptible to the illness. Or as with my family, we decided that the slight risk of my children contracting COVID outweighed the even slighter risk of the vaccine. 

During my time serving as acting deputy secretary under the George W. Bush administration, I outlined what the department recommended as the duties of the federal government during a pandemic. None of these responsibilities were designed to eradicate any disease, but to reduce the peak of a pandemic to a level of cases that could be cared for. Once a pandemic spreads to the world, you cannot eradicate it; you cannot return to a state of zero, but you can mitigate the effects, develop cures and improve lives. 

Waging an all-out “COVID Zero” campaign and demanding mandatory vaccination of 28 million children fails to recognize two things: 

• Emphasizing vaccination out of a mistaken goal for society to be “COVID Zero,” meaning that there could be no case of COVID in the United States (or the world), is an unattainable benchmark. The only infectious disease we have fully eradicated so far is smallpox, and it has very different characteristics. The “COVID Zero” approach forces the perfect to become the enemy of the good. In reality, it is a waste of our time, resources and efforts on an extremely unlikely campaign to prevent even a single transmission; and 
• This effort would require that we pull resources from research and development programs on vaccines for other illnesses that pose greater threats to children, including respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). RSV hospitalizes 58,000 children under age 5 in the U.S. annually. Compare that to 1,647 hospitalizations with COVID for the same age group during the entirety of the pandemic; the data simply does not support abandoning the effort to protect children from these fatal diseases for a crusade to vaccinate all children against COVID.

Approving the COVID vaccines for voluntary use is a remarkable accomplishment. However, with this new milestone of FDA’s approval of vaccines for children ages 5-11, it is paramount that we respect the parents’ right to evaluate the evidence for themselves in a calm and reasonable way.

No family should be badgered into making a decision to vaccinate — or not vaccinate — their children, and we must eliminate the malicious rhetoric from both sides of the aisle around the conversation. It detracts from the overall goal of overcoming this pandemic and instead produces more skepticism and ill will in our society.  

Eric D. Hargan was most recently Deputy Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services after having served as acting secretary. He also served at HHS under George W. Bush. In addition to serving on the Board of Operation Warp Speed, Eric oversaw the set-up and launch of the Provider Relief Fund and other parts of the U.S. pandemic response.  Since leaving his post at HHS, Hargan has launched The Hargan Group and joined the boards of University Hospitals in Cleveland; Alio Medical; Tomorrow Health; and HealthTrackRx. Follow him on Twitter at @EricDHargan.