“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.
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.”
While some outspoken individuals, like Kavita Patel, a physician and former Obama administration official, took to Twitter on Tuesday evening to criticize the false claims and rebut them point-by-point, federal officials have been more muted in their response. In interviews Tuesday evening, several administration officials said they had no plans to engage with the false claims, worried about amplifying them. But by Wednesday morning, the administration’s calculation had changed, following Carlson’s segment, amid mounting outrage toward federal health officials as vaccine critics seized on the wrongly reported claim that the CDC was set to mandate the shots for schoolchildren.
“Thanks to @GovRonDeSantis, COVID mandates are NOT allowed in FL, NOT pushed into schools, & I continue to recommend against them for healthy kids,” Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general, wrote on Twitter.
The CDC took to Twitter around noon Wednesday, quoting Carlson’s tweet and…
Read More: False coronavirus claim goes viral before experts can respond
