Throughout the pandemic, “public health experts” noted that the rate of childhood vaccinations was dropping. They seemed to have been shocked by this turn of events. However, most of us could have looked at the environment of unreasoning fear imposed upon the nation by the unholy alliance of people out to make a name for themselves, Pharma, the media, and millions of very stupid people and predicted that outcome.

Now with the reign of terror going away and COVID panic becoming the province of nutters,

I will not be flying @AlaskaAir until they reinstate public safety measures against #COVID19. #boycottAlaskaAir. https://t.co/XYqKaraaWE

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) April 18, 2022

the people who caused the panic are beginning to survey the wreckage brought on by their labors.

Kids aren’t getting caught up on routine shots they missed during the pandemic, and many vaccination proponents are pointing to Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy as a big reason why.

Public health experts, pediatricians, school nurses, immunization advocates and state officials in 10 states told POLITICO they are worried that an increasing number of families are projecting their attitudes toward the Covid-19 vaccine onto shots for measles, chickenpox, meningitis and other diseases.

That spillover of vaccine hesitancy may also be fueling an uptick in religious exemption requests from parents of school-aged children and is making it more difficult for states to catch up with children who missed immunizations during the pandemic’s early days when families skipped doctor’s appointments, they say.

This observation comes from Politico in a story titled: Kids are behind on routine immunizations. Covid vaccine hesitancy isn’t helping.

The story goes on to try to tie some very loose correlations together into causation and transform that causation into blame.

At the beginning of the pandemic, immunization rates for children plummeted. In 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saw a 15 percent drop from pre-pandemic levels in states’ orders for Vaccines for Children, the federal program through which about half the children in the country are immunized. In 2021, order levels were about 7 percent lower than pre-pandemic levels, according to the CDC.

In Florida, where the surgeon general last month announced that healthy children may not benefit from Covid vaccines, 2-year-old routine rates for all immunizations in county-run facilities plummeted from 92.1 percent in 2019 to 79.3 percent in 2021.

In Tennessee, nearly 14 percent fewer vaccine doses were given to children under 2 in 2020 and 2021 than before the pandemic.

And in Idaho, the number of kids who received their first dose of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine by age 2 decreased from roughly 21,000 in 2018 and 2019 to 17,000 in 2021.

This is a classic case of “shooting yourself in the foot and complaining about the pain.”

I do not doubt there is “vaccine hesitancy” about having young children vaccinated for COVID. However, I think it is safe to say that the COVID vaccine was cleared for use in a population facing minimal risks from disease exposure in a truncated process unparalleled in the annals of vaccine development. While an adult might agree to be vaccinated against COVID for any number of reasons, like being able to stay employed, that doesn’t imply that they are willing to subject their children to a risk that could be perceived as being orders of magnitude greater than the benefit. More questions arise when the companies that developed the COVID vaccines have gone to court to avoid releasing clinical trial data. In one case, Pfizer and the FDA–you know, the people who are supposed to protect us–teamed up to demand a delay of the data release for 55 years.

Now, after using the political process to bully and intimidate people into getting a vaccine they didn’t want for a disease that presented a no-to-moderate risk for most people so they could attend school, serve in the Armed Forces, or have gainful employment, the same people are asking for politics to be kept out of it.

“We just want to keep measles, polio, and all the things we vaccinate against out of the political arena,” said Hugo Scornik, a pediatrician and president of the Georgia Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Sorry, Doc, you can’t unring that bell. By making the COVID vaccine a political issue and tying it to childhood vaccinations, parents are understandably reluctant to put themselves in a situation where their child could be vaccinated for COVID without parental consent (read the Journal of the American Medical Association’s advocacy for this position) or where Child Protective Services could become involved.

The bottom line is that before 2020 most of us trusted our doctors and largely deferred to so-called public health experts. Since the pandemic, we don’t. As I posted earlier about the alleged bio labs in Ukraine (see The Liar’s Paradox and Why We Should Not Trust the US Government’s Word About Biological Weapons Labs in Ukraine), these people have lied to us and tried to manipulate us by fake information and fear to push a political goal. They are no longer deserving of our trust. It may be inevitable that we see outbreaks of infectious diseases that childhood vaccinations could curb; when those happen, just remember it is because of the lies told to justify the COVID vaccine that is the root cause. “Vaccine hesitancy” is based on experience, not fear or politics.