Misinformation issue: False claim that CDC would require covid vaccines for kids goes viral

False claim that CDC would require covid vaccines for kids goes viral A false report that the CDC will mandate vaccines for schoolchildren is “dangerous misinformation,” a former top health official said. Washington Post

On Tuesday morning, a Fox News contributor claimed on Twitter that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was set to mandate that schoolchildren get coronavirus vaccines. By Tuesday evening, the claim was being repeated by the nation’s most popular cable news show, and had been amplified to millions more on social media.

“The CDC is about to add the Covid vaccine to the childhood immunization schedule, which would make the vax mandatory for kids to attend school,” host Tucker Carlson tweeted, sharing a segment from his show that has been viewed more than 1.5 million times online.

But the claim was wrong: The CDC cannot mandate that schoolchildren receive vaccines, a decision left up to states and jurisdictions, the agency and multiple public health officials said. The initial tweet by Nicole Saphier, a radiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, also misconstrued a planned meeting of CDC advisers, who voted Wednesday to add coronavirus vaccines to the federal Vaccines for Children (VFC), a safety-net program that offers the shots at no cost. A separate meeting set for Thursday would address the agency’s immunization schedule for children.

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Public health experts said there is a legitimate debate over whether schoolchildren should be required to be vaccinated against the coronavirus — but the incendiary and erroneous claim by the Fox News personalities is the latest example of how critics can twist the facts about the CDC and the coronavirus, potentially contributing to lower vaccination rates, fading trust in federal health officials and other consequences for public health.

“This is an all new level of dangerous misinformation,” Jerome M. Adams, who served as U.S. surgeon general during the Trump administration and as Indiana’s top health official, wrote in a text message to The Washington Post. “It could both harm kids (by derailing the VFC program, which helps disadvantaged children access vaccines) and endanger health officials (due to angry misinformed parents). We need to be able to have honest conversations about pros and cons of vaccinating children, without resorting to blatant misinformation.”

The episode also illustrates how health-care misinformation can rapidly take hold, particularly around the coronavirus vaccine and fueled by many Americans’ frustrations and confusion with pandemic policies. But public health experts often feel stymied in their response, uncertain when to engage with false claims spreading virally. And when officials do weigh in, they are often constrained by their more deliberate, sometimes bureaucratic processes.

“I’ve been doing vaccine work for more than two decades. And what I’ve seen, thanks to social media, misinformation and disinformation can spread so much more quickly now,” said Julie Morita, executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Chicago’s former public health commissioner. “There’s no quick fix for this.”

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