It was bad enough when people would self-righteously post pictures of themselves with their “I voted” stickers on Election Day, but 2021 saw an even more annoying trend: adults posting photos of themselves getting vaccinated or showing off their vaccination cards on social media.
But now, there’s a new trend brewing: parents posting pictures of their kids getting vaccinated.
This didn’t seem like a thing for 12-to-18-year-olds. Still, since the FDA authorized Pfizer’s COVID vaccine for kids ages 5 through 11, I have been seeing parents on Twitter and Facebook posting pictures of the unnecessarily masked children getting their unnecessary COVID-19 vaccination as if to prove, yet again, what great citizens they are.
Parents, I beg you, don’t post pictures of your kids getting vaccinated.
While there may be kids who have certain health conditions that may actually put them at risk, COVID is less deadly to our kids than the seasonal flu. In fact, unvaccinated kids are at a lower risk of death from COVID than fully vaccinated adults of any age. Therefore, vaccinating kids with underlying health conditions that put them at risk of succumbing to COVID makes more sense than vaccinating kids who are not at risk.
“According to that data, an unvaccinated 10-year-old, who may look like the very picture of COVID vulnerability heading into the school year, faces a lower mortality risk than a vaccinated 25-year-old, whom we might today regard as close to safe as can be,” noted David Wallace-Wells of New York Magazine back in September. “In England, the incidence of hospitalization among unvaccinated kids was lower than that of those vaccinated aged 18-29, and in recent weeks, the hospitalization rate among kids ages 5 to 14 have been only about one per 100,000.”
“To put it more bluntly,” he continued, “in assessing an individual’s risk of dying from covid, age appears still as important—and maybe even more important—than vaccination status.”
But, back in September, the FDA rejected approval for universal booster shots over an increased risk of heart issues in young males. As my PJMedia colleague Stacey Lennox also noted, the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) determined in September that “the ‘margin of benefit’ for vaccinating 12- to 15-year-olds was ‘considered too small’ to recommend all children in this age group be vaccinated.”
If you’re a parent, you probably know that if one child gets sick in your kid’s class, there’s a good chance it will spread, and your kid will get sick too. For a long time, it was expected that schools would be superspreaders for COVID. But, it turns out they aren’t. In fact, the CDC acknowledged back in July that “multiple studies have shown that transmission within school settings is typically lower than — or at least similar to — levels of community transmission when prevention strategies are in place in schools.”
So, unless your child has an underlying health condition, you should probably pass on the vaccination. But if you do get them vaccinated, there’s no reason to brag about it on social media—especially if they don’t have an underlying condition that puts them at real risk from it. Don’t use your kids to brag about what a great citizen you think you are. Because you’re not. You’re just being obnoxious.
