Former Obama administration Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius recently appeared on CNN’s “OutFront” with Erin Burnett. Sebelius argued that unvaccinated Americans are “impinging” on others’ rights.
She also argued that unvaccinated Americans should not be allowed to work or be around kids. Sebelius made the quite extraordinary and controversial claims on CNN. Watch:
“We’re in a situation where we have a wildly effective vaccine, multiple choices, lots available, free of charge, and we have folks who are just saying I won’t do it,” she said. “I think that it’s time to say to those folks, it’s fine if you don’t choose to get vaccinated. You may not come to work. You may not have access to a situation where you’re going to put my grandchildren in jeopardy. Where you might kill them, or you might put them in a situation where they’re going to carry the virus to someone in a high-risk position.”
“That’s, I think the point where we are, is freedom is one thing, but freedom when you harm others like secondhand smoke and issues that we’ve dealt with very clearly in the past you can’t drive drunk,” she continued. “You can drink, but you can’t drive drunk because you can injure other people. You can’t smoke inside of a public place where you can give cancer to someone else in spite of their never having been a smoker.”
“So I think we’re reaching that point in the United States where those of us who are vaccinated, I want to take off my mask. I want to be able to live my life with vaccination, and right now, I’m being impinged on by people who say I don’t want to get vaccinated,” she added. “It’s fine. I want them to maybe have a limitation on where they can go and who they can possibly infect.”
However, there is a problem with Sebelius’s argument that is quite indisputable and a matter of basic reason. It is this: If people are afraid of COVID, they are free to get the vaccination. Vaccinations protect you from getting COVID. If other people don’t want to get the vaccination, that is their personal decision. It is literally, ‘my body, my choice.’
Furthermore, children are not significantly at risk from COVID-19. This is an empirical fact borne out by the data. A new Wall Street Journal report provides the latest research that this is undeniably the case.
“Children are at extremely slim risk of dying from Covid-19, according to some of the most comprehensive studies to date, which indicate the threat might be even lower than previously thought,” WSJ notes.
“Some 99.995% of the 469,982 children in England who were infected during the year examined by researchers survived,” one study found.
“In fact, there were fewer deaths among children due to the virus than initially suspected,” it continues. “Among the 61 child deaths linked to a positive Covid-19 test in England, 25 were actually caused by the illness.”
“England is a large enough country and it’s had enough Covid, sadly, that we have better data than almost anywhere else in the world on the risks,” said Russell Viner, a professor of adolescent health at the University College London Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and senior author on the study.
There are around 100 million American citizens under 18 in the United States. The mortality risk posed to healthy young people is insignificant: The CDC’s numbers show that 331 people under 18 have died with COVID, and it estimated elsewhere that 95% of mortality cases overall are people with serious multiple co-morbidities. This leads to a COVID survival rate in the U.S. of 99.9997%, including the vast majority who are “at risk” due to underlying health conditions.
Futhermore, childhood COVID vaccine administration has been tied by the CDC to rare cases of heart inflammation in young adults. In June, a Centers for Disease Control advisory group released a statement on the ‘likely link’ between COVID-19 vaccinations and heart inflammation in rare cases on Wednesday. In over 300 cases of reported myocarditis or pericarditis, a Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccination preceded the heart condition.
The COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Technical (VaST) Work Group noted the adverse reaction in vaccinated males between the ages of 16 and 24. The development of the heart condition was observed in adolescents and young adults and was considerably higher after the second dose in males.
The medical risk breakdown is shown below:
The lockdowns and mask mandates have caused lasting damage to children’s education, in what the Washington Post called a “lost generation.”
“After the U.S. education system fractured into Zoom screens last spring, experts feared millions of children would fall behind,” the Post states. “Hard evidence now shows they were right.”
Forcing children to wear masks, socially distance and participate in distance learning is also taking a psychological toll. In October, the Annual State of Mental Health in America showed that anxiety and depression nationwide had hit an all-time high, and was hitting ‘young people the hardest.’
While many are concerned that the Delta variant may lead to a repeat situation for the country, it has proven to be even less deadly than the first wave of COVID for all demographics. It has a case survival rate of 99.9% according to NHS official figures.
All things considered, therefore, the masks may be doing more damage to children’s health than COVID would even if they were infected. A lab analysis from the University of Florida showed 11 dangerous pathogens on masks worn by children for just eight hours.
A newly-released study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics found that carbon dioxide in masks were at unhealthy levels for children.
“The results found an average of 13,120 and 13,910 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air inhaled by children while wearing surgical and filtering masks, respectively,” the report said. “Under German law, the carbon dioxide contents of a closed room cannot exceed 2000 ppm, more than six times less than the masked children were inhaling.”
“The results also found that carbon dioxide levels tended to increase the younger the children were, with one 7-year-old’s levels measured at 25,000 ppm,” it continued. “The authors claim that most of the complaints made by children about wearing masks can be explained by increased carbon dioxide levels.”
Mask mandates do not appear to have an appreciable effect on COVID-related case rates or death rates. A recent CDC study showed they have 0.9%-1.9% effect on case rates if used for 100 days. This is miniscule, and in regards to children, statistically inconsequential.
Nonetheless, the Democratic Party and its allies at the CDC continue to spin statistically insignifant risks as life-and-death situations that require the infringement of Americans’ liberty and personal choice. But if such an approach was taken for every issue, the U.S. government would have to ban trains, planes and automobiles, in addition to cleaning supplies, bathtubs, and swimming pools, which are all significant causes of death in the United States.