Following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation Thursday to add the COVID-19 vaccine to childrens’ annual immunization schedule, GOP gubernatorial nominee Tudor Dixon echoed false right-wing claims that the government is now requiring the vaccine for school children.
“A Dixon Administration would fight this government overreach and move to ban Michigan schools from adding COVID-19 vaccines to the required list,” Dixon said in a statement Thursday. “Liberal policymakers are pushing COVID-19 vaccines on our children and forcing parents out of the process.”
The CDC panel’s recommendation means only that the guideline for commonly recommended childhood vaccinations has been updated to include the COVID-19 vaccination. It does not translate into a mandate of any sort, for schools or otherwise.
Additionally, only states can establish vaccine requirements for schoolchildren, as the CDC pointed out in a tweet correcting a false claim made by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has routinely spread misinformation about COVID vaccines.
Thursday, CDC’s independent advisory committee (ACIP) will vote on an updated childhood immunization schedule. States establish vaccine requirements for school children, not ACIP or CDC. More: https://t.co/w80hpKCvtt. https://t.co/xSMZfihtm9
— CDC (@CDCgov) October 19, 2022
“Parents should be in charge of deciding if the COVID-19 vaccine is right for their child — not the CDC or [Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer’s bureaucrats,” Dixon said in her statement.
Dixon is facing Whitmer on Nov. 8. Although Whitmer has encouraged Michiganders to get vaccinated, the state of Michigan does not have a vaccine mandate for COVID-19 and unvaccinated children are not precluded from attending school.
This is not the first time Dixon has touted misinformation about COVID-19 and children.
In 2020 episodes of the right-wing “America’s Voice Live” that Dixon co-hosted, Dixon claimed that “our kids are not at risk” for catching COVID-19 — a statement that Whitmer pointed out during the Oct. 13 gubernatorial debate, but Dixon has since denied saying.
She has falsely and repeatedly claimed on the show that there was “no evidence” kids could transmit the virus, and that “this is not a virus that affects the young students.”
Although children face lower rates of hospitalization and death from the virus, COVID-19 is still currently the fifth leading cause of death for children younger than 5. And while children tend to be mildly symptomatic or asymptomatic upon catching COVID-19, they are nonetheless just as infectious to others.
Since the debate, Dixon has made numerous statements at public events expressing doubts about the safety of COVID vaccines, including remarks about the “dangers” of “experimental vaccines.”
Both the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines have undergone rigorous processes to receive full approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
To date, 2,874,009 Michiganders have tested positive for COVID-19 since March 2020 and 39,092 people have died.
About 68.6% of Michigan’s population has received one or more doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, 61.5% has been fully vaccinated and 35.1% of residents have received a booster shot.
authored by Laina G. Stebbins
First published at https%3A%2F%2Fmichiganadvance.com%2F2022%2F10%2F21%2Fdixon-spreads-misinformation-about-covid-19-vaccine-and-schools%2F
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