Why Are We Boosting Kids?

The Covid vaccines are medical miracles. During the pandemic they have been literal life-savers; I’ll never forget the relief I felt after getting that first shot. Despite the conspiracy theories in some corners of the web or on Fox News, there is simply zero evidence that they are killing people; that they are harming people in large numbers; or that this is all some malicious plot by Big Pharma. There is overwhelming proof that these vaccines prevent serious illness. Like all medical interventions, though, vaccines can have side effects. And in the case of mRNA vaccines—those from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna—there is a small but real risk for young people, especially young males. The need for an evidence-based discussion about the wisdom of requiring boosters is urgent. But that’s easier said than done. Over the course of this pandemic, the public has been told that pronouncements from federal health officials represent “the science.” Distinguished medical experts, including some from our nation’s most elite institutions, who have questioned official Covid recommendations and policies—on everything from lockdowns to masking to vaccine mandates—have often been demonized and sometimes silenced. And so healthy debate about scientifically complicated and morally complex subjects has been shut down, both by censors and by self-censorship. David Zweig has been one of those rare journalists who, from the start, has challenged the accepted narrative on Covid. He has published a stream of investigations for New York Magazine, the Atlantic, and Wired—from questioning the wisdom of closing schools, to hospitalization metrics, to masking children—that initially were maligned or ignored, only to be accepted by legacy media and acknowledged by health officials months later. Today, he reads an article he wrote for Common Sense that tackles the knotty subject of boosters and myocarditis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices