#The experts who approved the vax for kids were against mandating it

The Food and Drug Administration advisory panel that met in October to decide whether to recommend the COVID vaccine for children aged 5 to 11 anticipated the mistake New York City is on the verge of making.

Panel doctors, with one abstention, unanimously recommended approval — but warned that authorization could be misused as the basis for a mandate, which wasn’t necessary. Many recommended the jab only for children highly susceptible to bad COVID outcomes and said the vaccine’s risk of heart-related side effects in the young made waiting a reasonable decision.

Yet Mayor-elect Eric Adams said last week that he’ll require the city’s 1 million public-school students be vaccinated if his Department of Health advises it. Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers union, also backs student vaccine mandates.

The de Blasio administration is already floating a trial balloon, with recent e-mails to public-school parents warning, “In a partial closing, vaccinated children will be allowed to continue attending school while unvaccinated children will be required to attend school remotely and asynchronously.”

Here and in Chicago, San Francisco and other cities across the country, children must already be vaxxed to enter indoor public spaces like museums, restaurants and theaters.

The politicians instituting unreasonable restrictions clearly didn’t watch the FDA approval debate. The expert panel met for eight hours, discussing not just the vaccine’s dosing and safety but also its best uses. And on universal vaccination, not to mention mandated vaccination, a number of experts were decidedly opposed.

Dr. Michael Nelson, chief of the University of Virginia’s Division of Asthma, Allergy and Clinical Immunology, was one panelist who expressed concern: “Almost every vote cast today is going to be caveated based on the discussion we’ve had today. Personally, I see this as an access [to vaccination] question . . . not a mandate for all of this age group.” And: “To me, we should certainly not underestimate the knowledge and decision-making power of the public.”

Nelson testified that parents, not bureaucrats, were best equipped to assess their children’s vaccination needs.

Matt Shapiro noted at his Marginally Compelling site that other experts voiced hesitation during the hearing: “Dr. James Hildreth went so far as to say that the most appropriate path forward for many children would be to do nothing at all even after the vaccine is available.”

Another panel member, Dr. Cody Meissner, explained, “I think we saw approximately 68 percent of the children who are hospitalized with COVID-19 have underlying comorbidities, so that means about 32 percent do not. And then if we were to take 40 percent of that group that already have immunity already, we’re getting down to a very small percent of otherwise healthy 6- to 11-year-old children who might derive some benefit. And we simply don’t know what the side effects are going to be.”

His next comment was prescient: “It’s not even clear this vaccine will reduce rates of transmission. We’re hoping that’s the case, but we don’t know. This vaccine probably isn’t going to prevent infection, it’s going to prevent severe disease,” he said. “I’m just worried that if we say yes, the states are going to mandate administration of this vaccine to children in order to go to school. And I do not agree with that. I think that would be an error at this time until we get more information about the safety.”

There’s another downside to leaders ignoring the science, which is the continued loss of trust in the medical establishment. In October, FDA panel experts explicitly warned against mandated vaccines for children. Now mandates are being enacted across the country, for schools and public spaces alike, and the response from the medical community is silence.

Making a 5-year-old who has recovered from COVID be vaccinated before a visit to the zoo or school won’t make anyone safer; but it will contribute to the growing lack of credibility of the public-health establishment, not to mention bureaucrats with little background in science. That distrust is well earned and will likely stick around much longer than the immunity acquired from any vaccination.

Twitter and Instagram: @bethanyshondark