The American Academy of Pediatrics has given up the ghost. Each set of recommendations and guidance from the organization shows it to be a left-wing activist group that should no longer be treated with the reverence that it once was.
The AAP has split from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance on COVID-19 vaccines for children. The CDC removed the COVID-19 vaccine from its immunization schedule recommendations for children, which lists vaccine recommendations from birth to age 18. The first COVID-19 vaccination recommendation for children was at six months old, along with their first vaccination for the flu.
The AAP is now saying that children should begin getting the COVID-19 vaccine between six and 23 months old, claiming that “COVID-19 continues to result in hospitalization and death in the pediatric population” and that this alternative guidance was needed because “the environment of misinformation, which makes it more important than ever that we provide clear and confident guidance, because the majority of American families really depend on us for this guidance.”
As we have previously covered here at the Washington Examiner, the threat of COVID-19 for children is minuscule. The data from September 2021 showed that, from the start of the pandemic in March 2020 to that point, 0.0049% of children were hospitalized because of COVID-19, and 0.0005% had died from it. Data compiled by the AAP showed that 0.00%-0.03% of child COVID cases resulted in death. From March 2020 to September 2023, there were 1,696 COVID-19 “related” deaths among children, with the children in the AAP’s vaccination window accounting for just a fraction of that number.
Simply put, children are not at serious risk from COVID-19, unless they have a preexisting medical condition, in which case the CDC recommends they get vaccinated. There is no need for the AAP to break ranks from the CDC here, other than to signal its opposition to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the one time that he actually got a vaccine guidance correct.
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The AAP has been captured by left-wing activists. It asserted during the pandemic that forcibly masking children or their caregivers would have no effect on their development, which was clearly contradicted by the science. It supported forcibly masking all children in schools in defiance of the science that schools were not contributing to the spread of the virus. And, most notably, the AAP is all in on sex changes for “transgender” children, to the point that the organization is lashing out at the Supreme Court in a manner no different than other partisan organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union or Planned Parenthood.
The AAP, much like the ACLU, has surrendered whatever credibility it had so that it may push left-wing positions and signal its opposition to a Republican administration. The AAP is broken, contaminated by left-wing ideology, and its guidance and statements should be viewed with that in mind.