As elite colleges begin the process of peer pressure among institutions to implement mandates for COVID-vaccine booster shots, an op-ed by Johns Hopkins medical professor Dr. Marty Makary is a must-read:

The U.S. government is pushing Covid-19 vaccine boosters for 16- and 17-year-olds without supporting clinical data. A large Israeli population study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this month, found that the risk of Covid death in people under 30 with two vaccine shots was zero.

Booster mandates for healthy young people, which some colleges are imposing, will cause medical harm for the sake of transient reductions in mild and asymptomatic infections. In a study of 438,511 males 16 to 24, 56 developed myocarditis after their second Pfizer dose (or 1 in 7,830, at least seven times the usual rate). True, most cases were mild, but in the broader group of 136 people (including older and female patients) who developed myocarditis after the vaccine, seven had a “complicated course,” and one 22-year-old died. Moderna’s vaccine carries an even higher rate of heart complications, which is why some European countries have restricted it for people under 30. But in the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indiscriminately push for boosters for all young people.

Makary goes on to report that both the FDA and CDC are ignoring the recommendations of their own advisory boards, with some of their experts quitting over the controversy.  In the world of politicized public health, dominated by cowardly constituencies, vaccines are ushered right through the process while treatments that would be administered post-infection, not preventatively, are held back.

Forcing more measures for young adults and teens is simply not justified by their experience with COVID.  This has been true of the variants we’ve seen thus far, and Omicron is proving to be little more than a cold, especially for the young.  Generating panic is therefore doubly unjustified.

We’re truly getting to the point that people of good sense, who are immune to the moral panic that so easily grips secular elites no longer capable of processing the reality of risk, will have to put their feet down.  The absurdity of having to withdraw from college and suing for reimbursement is approaching, although there is still time for the wave to recede before it overcomes anybody outside of the most-elite and -irrational.

Featured image by the CDC on Unsplash.