Denial only serves the aims of anti-vaxxers.

On the Friday after Thanksgiving, Vinay Prasad, the FDA’s top vaccine regulator, made a claim that shocked the public-health establishment. “For the first time,” he wrote in a leaked email to his staff, “the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children.” The agency had supposedly identified at least 10 children who died from getting COVID shots.

To say the email was poorly received by vaccine experts and physicians would be an understatement. Prasad’s claim provoked a rapid series of rebuttals. A response from 12 former FDA commissioners, published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, called Prasad’s memo “a threat to evidence-based vaccine policy and public health security.” All of the potential vaccine-related deaths reported to the government, presumably including those to which Prasad referred, had already been reviewed by the agency’s staff, the former commissioners wrote, and “different conclusions” had been reached.

Elsewhere, doctors and scientists declared that absolutely no evidence links COVID-19 vaccines to death in children; and that in order to suggest otherwise, Prasad and his colleagues had engaged in an “evidence-manufacturing mission,” a “dumpster dive” for shoddy data, or—worse—a campaign of lying.

Prasad is among the public-health officials who, under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have been systematically undermining the nation’s confidence in immunizations. Prasad has not yet offered up any documentation to support his assertion, and his count of vaccine-related deaths may well turn out to be inflated. The memo’s overheated rhetoric and lengthy recitation of political grievances also raise some doubts about his claims.

Yet there’s something troubling—and telling—in the fact that his memo has provoked people to deny even the possibility of COVID-vaccine-related deaths. The idea that mRNA-based shots have, tragically, killed a very small number of children is not far-fetched. It also doesn’t imply a catastrophic threat to public health, given that tens of millions of doses of these vaccines have safely been given out to young people. From the start of the coronavirus pandemic, lack of nuance has been a problem with public-health messaging—one that anti-vaccine advocates have made use of to great effect. Now, in a moment when public health in America is under existential threat, this insistence that no evidence exists for vaccine-related deaths risks adding to the crisis.

https://archive.ph/roV8Q