White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci told the Financial Times on Sunday that the attitudes of "anti-vaxxers" espousing COVID-19 narratives may impact traditional childhood vaccination rates.
"I'm concerned the acceleration of an anti-vaxxer attitude in certain segments of the population ... might spill over into that kind of a negative attitude towards childhood vaccinations," Fauci told the Financial Times.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, offered no distinction between traditional childhood vaccinations such as those against polio, measles, tetanus, etc. with Moderna's and Pfizer-BioNTech's mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, which received the Food and Drug Administration's emergency use approval in June for children 6 months and older.
"If you fall back on vaccines against common vaccine-preventable childhood diseases, that's where you wind up getting avoidable and unnecessary outbreaks," Fauci added.
Fauci's statement was published roughly two weeks after New York-Presbyterian Hospital released an ad about myocarditis in children. It is unclear what bolstered the production of an ad about an ailment that, according to PoltiFact, affected "fewer than one-thousandth of 1% of children who received the [COVID-19] vaccine."
The 30-second ad opens with a girl, roughly 10, discussing her experience with myocarditis while offering a hopeful message to other children who develop the disease.
"One day I had a stomachache so bad I didn't want to do anything," the girl says. "The team at New York-Presbyterian said it was actually my heart. It was severely swollen — something called 'myocarditis.'
"But doctors gave me medicines and used machines to control my heartbeat. They saved me."
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, said Fauci fails to see that he is the one "fueling" traditional vaccine skepticism.
"The vaccine mandates pushed by Tony Fauci as well as the overstating of the efficacy of the COVID vaccines against infection have fueled vaccine skepticism," Bhattacharya told Newsmax. The Ivy League professor noted that mRNA technology is not found in any other type of vaccine — only COVID vaccines. He then added that Fauci's conflating of mRNA vaccines with traditional vaccines has created a kind of "fanaticism."
"So the mRNAs are a novel technology; there's a lot of evidence that, especially for young men and teenage boys, there is [a] high rate of side effects. COVID is nowhere near a huge risk for children, compared to other diseases such as diphtheria, polio or measles, for which they're vaccinated. Conflating the two is bound to create vaccine hesitancy, and it has."
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