The Trump administration is still promoting the purported benefits of COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children even as it reduces the childhood vaccine schedule, despite research suggesting no unvaccinated young person died of COVID in a major European country at the peak of its spread and that post-vaccination heart inflammation is a real risk.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's in-house publication gave mainstream media ammunition to attack Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy's scrutiny on vaccine safety and efficacy, running a study that implies COVID vaccines saved healthy kids from serious outcomes last season.

The research appeared in the CDC's Dec. 11 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which is not peer-reviewed and was accused of publishing methodologically weak research upholding COVID dogma between President Trump's terms. One of the loudest critics became the Food and Drug Administration's top vaccine regulator, Vinay Prasad.

The CDC's analysis of last season's COVID vaccine effectiveness in "immunocompetent children" surfaced again in media coverage of the vaccine schedule changes this week but also faced scrutiny from a top doctor and former deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association in the Sensible Medicine newsletter Dec. 30.

While the research estimates that COVID vaccines were 56-76% effective against "COVID-19–associated emergency department or urgent care" visits by kids without immune problems, the Associated Press led mainstream media in stretching those findings into the false claim that vaccines prevented "severe illness," Edward Livingston wrote.

Currently a health sciences researcher at UCLA Medicine, recognized for his HIV/AIDS coverage by the National Association of LGBTQ Journalists among other awards, Livingston didn't spare the CDC from criticism for its word choices. 

"By only presenting a big number for vaccine efficacy and referring to severe disease, the CDC has misled the public and pandered to the clickbait press that thirsts for headlines, especially when they are critical of the current administration," he said.

The administration's continued support for COVID vaccines at all age groups and health conditions may be having limited effect, however. The CDC estimates as of Tuesday that only 7.4% of children and 16.6% of adults received this season's vaccine, with elderly adults twice as likely as adults as a whole to have it.

9% efficacy against hospitalization

The Trump administration's public health agencies this term somewhat resemble a married couple whose votes cancel each other out, with leaders such as Kennedy and Prasad setting an agenda that underlings either resist or slow-walk.

The CDC did not change the Biden administration's claim that COVID vaccines are a "safer, more reliable way to build protection" than natural immunity, regardless of age or health condition, when it updated a page on current vaccines Nov. 19. It also still claims SARS-CoV-2 can kill kids or give them lifelong health problems without infection symptoms.

New Harvard-led research on Spanish youth undermines that narrative, suggesting the virus did not kill any of them at the height of its spread, while new Stanford research reiterates the well-documented elevated risk of heart inflammation for young people at low risk from COVID itself following vaccination, especially after a second mRNA dose.

Published in the peer-reviewed Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal Dec. 16, the Spanish study reviewed the effectiveness and safety of COVID mRNA vaccines in children 6-17, linking the Madrid Health System Registry with Madrilenian Health Service databases for primary care, hospital admissions and pharmacy. 

The corresponding author is Miguel Hernán, who directs the five-year-old CAUSALab at Harvard's school of public health. 

Unvaccinated children accounted for 2.2 million of the 2.7 million in the study, conducted from May 2021 to December 2022 when the Omicron variant blew through vaccinated groups worldwide. Its conclusion: "The risks and benefits of COVID-19 vaccines were small in a general population of children 6–17 years of age." 

No one died from COVID in the study, whose estimates of other outcomes had wide confidence intervals because so few children developed them.

The risk difference for COVID hospitalization between unvaccinated and vaccinated kids 6-11 was 1.2 per 100,000 over 240 days, and for 12-17 year-olds, 5.3, meaning vaccinated kids had a slight edge in avoiding hospitalization. 

Vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization for younger kids was only 9%, with an upper boundary of 49%. While it was 45% with an upper boundary of 72% for older kids, the estimated figure would only be 15% if the study defined COVID hospitalization "exclusively" based on a COVID diagnosis at admission, the authors said.

Former New York Times drug industry reporter Alex Berenson marveled that "about 38,000 mRNA jabs were required to avoid one Covid hospitalization – an absurdly high number given the known short-term side effects of the shots and the potential long-term risks of exposing young people to mRNA."

He called the results "the strongest evidence yet that the oft-repeated claim that Covid has killed 2,100 American children is fiction."

None of the younger kids in either group got myocarditis or pericarditis, forms of heart inflammation, while older vaccinated kids had a slightly higher risk, 7.6 per 100,000, compared to 6.9 for those unvaccinated.

"The highly effective SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines were essential for limiting the COVID-19 pandemic," opens a Dec. 10 study on COVID vaccines and heart inflammation by Stanford Medicine researchers in Science Translational Medicine, which is paywalled except for its jargon-laden abstract.

"Vaccine-associated myocarditis occurs in about one in every 140,000 vaccinees after a first dose and rises to one in 32,000 after a second dose," according to Stanford Med's article on the NIH-funded study. "For reasons that aren’t clear, incidence peaks among male vaccinees age 30 or below, at one in 16,750 vaccinees."

Previous research focused on younger males has pegged the risk much higher after the second mRNA dose, around 1 in 3,000 to 6,000 for 16-24 year-olds.

Stanford Med researchers discovered two proteins, CXCL10 and IFN-gamma, in the blood of vaccinated individuals who developed myocarditis, the article said.

These cytokines – "signaling substances that immune cells secrete to carry on chemical conversations with one another" – trigger "macrophage and neutrophil infiltration," which the article describes as "shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later warrior immune cells [that] often unload friendly fire" on healthy tissue, in this case the heart.

"Elevated inflammatory cytokine signaling could be a class effect of mRNA vaccines," but previous research suggests their harmful effects could be mitigated by genistein, "a mild estrogen-like substance derived from soybeans" with anti-inflammatory properties, the article says.

'Anything but objective' language intended to counter HHS leaders

The MMWR study on COVID vaccines and kids, whose dozen-plus researchers include a CDC epidemiologist, made a splash across mainstream media last month. 

Many outlets carried the AP's report claiming the research showed vaccines "can keep kids from developing a severe illness" and contrasting it with the administration's removal of COVID vaccines from the childhood schedule last fall.

NBC News was even more brazen, putting "severe illness" in the headline and deeming the findings "a conclusion top federal health officials have questioned in recent months."

The research reappeared last week in a USA Today opinion essay by the founder of Kentucky-based Health Watch USA, which paired its findings with American Academy of Pediatrics estimates of prior years' pediatric COVID hospitalizations.

Researchers used the nine-state VISION network to conclude that the 2024-25 COVID vaccine had 76% effectiveness against COVID-associated ER or urgent care visits for healthy kids 9 months to 4 years old, and 56% for 5-17 year-olds, compared to those who didn't get a 2024-25 vaccine. The study population was nearly 100,000.

Typical of COVID vaccine research, it stops counting vaccine effectiveness after six months and doesn't include the first week of vaccination in calculating VE.

Researchers arguably carried out a bait-and-switch, opening the paper by noting the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in June 2024 recommended the upcoming season's vaccine for everyone 6 months and up "to provide additional protection against severe COVID-19." It's the only use of "severe" in the study.

"At a time when the public has lost trust in health authorities because of poor performance during the pandemic, with various HHS agencies pulling back on vaccine recommendations, the CDC went all in with a headline suggesting a huge benefit of COVID vaccination in kids," Livingston, the former JAMA deputy editor, wrote in Sensible Medicine.

The research "only counted children who were seen in emergency or urgent care departments for COVID-like illness, of whom only 3% had COVID," and didn't mention COVID severity or what happened to kids after these visits, he wrote, noting the CDC's own 2023-24 data on COVID deaths show under 1 per 100,000 in minors.

Livingston emphasized the paltry numbers of children from 9 months through age 4 in the study who actually had both COVID-like illness and a positive test for SARS-CoV-2, just a dozen out of more than 44,000. About 1,800 had CLI but a negative test.

The VE is calculated from the 12 children with positive tests out of 42,682 unvaccinated and 15 with positives out of 2,207 vaccinated, resulting in a rate of 39 needed to vaccinate for one to benefit, which would be "amazing" if the data weren't confounded, he said.

Some children who came in must have been "ill from something else and had an incidentally positive COVID test," and because severe disease is already rare in children, "the number needed to treat is probably much larger than 39 to prevent clinically important COVID in young children," according to Livingston.

The phrasing was "anything but objective," undermining the CDC's classification of COVID vaccines under "shared decision-making" by trying to "influence public opinion in favor of vaccination in contrast to messages coming from other parts of HHS," he said.