In my email on March 19, a Medscape “Perspective” post by William G. Wilkoff MD titled “Waiting for the Under-5 COVID-19 Vaccine” caught my attention. He opens by noting that “Pfizer and BioNTech announced that they were delaying the application for their COVID-19 vaccine for children under the age of 5.” He goes on to say that “earlier evidence suggest that two doses may not provide adequate protection in the 2- to 4-year old age group.”
What?!?! Wilkoff has an MD degree, and presumably has some passing acquaintance with the basic concepts of illness, immunity, and statistics. To make matters worse, he’s a pediatrician with a long career in clinical practice. So, unlike Fauci, who hasn’t treated a patient in five decades, Wilkoff definitely should know better. And when writing for a national medical newsletter you’d think he would be somewhat aware of the literature related to pediatrics and COVID. It’s his ethical duty to provide accurate information.
He might be forgiven for not knowing that the FDA and CDC have carefully avoided allowing facts to escape their lairs, but the English NHS data should have been somewhere in his knowledge base. And that data has consistently shown that under the age of 55, the risk of death from COVID is statistically indistinguishable from zero. In plain English it says that a child’s chance of dying from COVID is about the same as expiring from a rattlesnake bite in Antarctica.
The pediatric literature is even more damning.