Former Obama administration Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius recently appeared on CNN’s “OutFront” with Erin Burnett. Sebelius argued that unvaccinated Americans are “impinging” on others’ rights.
She also argued that unvaccinated Americans should not be allowed to work or be around kids. Sebelius made the quite extraordinary and controversial claims on CNN.
“We’re in a situation where we have a wildly effective vaccine, multiple choices, lots available, free of charge, and we have folks who are just saying I won’t do it,” she said. “I think that it’s time to say to those folks, it’s fine if you don’t choose to get vaccinated. You may not come to work. You may not have access to a situation where you’re going to put my grandchildren in jeopardy. Where you might kill them, or you might put them in a situation where they’re going to carry the virus to someone in a high-risk position.”
“That’s, I think the point where we are, is freedom is one thing, but freedom when you harm others like secondhand smoke and issues that we’ve dealt with very clearly in the past you can’t drive drunk,” she continued. “You can drink, but you can’t drive drunk because you can injure other people. You can’t smoke inside of a public place where you can give cancer to someone else in spite of their never having been a smoker.”
“So I think we’re reaching that point in the United States where those of us who are vaccinated, I want to take off my mask. I want to be able to live my life with vaccination, and right now, I’m being impinged on by people who say I don’t want to get vaccinated,” she added. “It’s fine. I want them to maybe have a limitation on where they can go and who they can possibly infect.”
However, there is a problem with Sebelius’s argument that is quite indisputable and a matter of basic reason. It is this: If people are afraid of COVID, they are free to get the vaccination. Vaccinations protect you from getting COVID. If other people don’t want to get the vaccination, that is their personal decision. It is literally, ‘my body, my choice.’
Furthermore, children are not significantly at risk from COVID-19. This is an empirical fact borne out by the data. A new Wall Street Journal report provides the latest research that this is undeniably the case.
“Children are at extremely slim risk of dying from Covid-19, according to some of the most comprehensive studies to date, which indicate the threat might be even lower than previously thought,” WSJ notes.
“Some 99.995% of the 469,982 children in England who were infected during the year examined by researchers survived,” one study found.
“In fact, there were fewer deaths among children due to the virus than initially suspected,” it continues. “Among the 61 child deaths linked to a positive Covid-19 test in England, 25 were actually caused by the illness.”
“England is a large enough country and it’s had enough Covid, sadly, that we have better data than almost anywhere else in the world on the risks,” said Russell Viner, a professor of adolescent health at the University College London Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and senior author on the study.