Top vaccine advocate falsely claims healthy children died of COVID-19

Pediatrician and prominent vaccine advocate Dr. Paul Offit made false claims about child deaths from COVID-19 on Tuesday as he railed against the Trump administration’s recent recommendation against the mRNA shots for children and pregnant women.

On Tuesday, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary and National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to announce that the COVID-19 shots are being removed from the immunization schedule for pregnant women and children.

Shortly after the announcement, Dr. Paul Offit appeared on CNN to bash the Trump administration for its decision. Offit is the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and a former member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. He is on the FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, has published over 150 scientific papers, and has co-edited Vaccines, the country’s preeminent vaccine textbook.

Offit told CNN’s Dana Bash that the new recommendation is “bad,” claiming that hundreds of healthy children have died from COVID-19.

“I think it’s a bad recommendation,” he said. “I mean, you surely know that by six months of age, all children will be vulnerable to all viruses continuing to circulate. There have been retrospective studies looking at children, meaning people less than 18 years of age, who’ve gotten a yearly vaccine to show that there is benefit. So it doesn’t make sense, I think it puts children unnecessarily in harm’s way, and there’s been about 1,000 deaths during this pandemic in children. One-third of deaths were in children who were perfectly healthy before that. So I think it’s a bad idea.”

A false claim

Offit’s claim is false, according to data. Statistically, children are at zero risk of death from COVID-19. In 2022, the CDC was forced to remove its claim that children were dying from COVID-19 after admitting the data did not exist. The agency had warned on its website that nearly 100 children aged 5 to 11 had died from COVID-19: “As of mid-October 2021, children ages 5 through 11 years have experienced more than 8,300 COVID-19 related hospitalizations and nearly 100 deaths from COVID-19.” But when pressed through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the CDC admitted it had no such data.

New study: COVID shots linked to autoimmune diseases

COVID-19 vaccines, on the other hand, have been shown to be harmful for children. A new study published last week in Pediatric Rheumatology found that kids who have at least one COVID-19 shot are 23% more likely to develop an autoimmune disease. The same study found no link between autoimmune diseases and COVID-19 infections.

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