Johns Hopkins doctor: COVID vaccines ‘should not be required for all Americans’

A professor at Johns Hopkins University is arguing that the one-size-fits-all approach to universal vaccination being pushed in the U.S. is misguided and based on bad science. 

Marty Makary, a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins, said in U.S. News and World Reports that "the notion that we have to vaccinate every living, walking American – and eventually every newborn – in order to control the pandemic is based on the false assumption that the risk of dying from COVID-19 is equally distributed in the population."

"It's not," he continued. "We have always known that it's very hard for the virus to hurt someone who is young and healthy. And that's still the case. While vaccine requirements for health care workers make sense, we would never extend those requirements outside of health care for, say, the flu shot."

Makary further pointed out that at least some individuals have already acquired natural immunity to COVID. 

"Requiring the vaccine in people who are already immune with natural immunity has no scientific support," he argued. "While vaccinating those people may be beneficial – and it's a reasonable hypothesis that vaccination may bolster the longevity of their immunity – to argue dogmatically that they must get vaccinated has zero clinical outcome data to back it."

"The goal of our pandemic response should be to reduce death, illness and disability," he said, "but instead what you're seeing is a movement that has morphed from being pro-vaccine to vaccine fanaticism at all costs."