Liberals Are Losing Credibility on COVID at a Rapid Pace

In Slate earlier this month, a parent wrote into an advice columnist to ask whether they were being overprotective because they would not allow their fully vaccinated 15-year-old to attend a two-week summer camp because the camp wasn't requiring proof of vaccination or mask-wearing. "And while she would be much less at risk than the kids at camp who are not protected by the vaccine—she’s 95 percent protected, they are 0 percent protected—there is still a risk to her that doesn’t seem worth taking," the advice-seeker wrote, adding that they did not want to give "tacit approval" to the camp's methods by sending their kid there. "Am I being ridiculous?" they wanted to know. "My daughter insists I am."

"You are not being ridiculous," answered advice columnist Michelle Herman. "Teenagers are at greater risk than was previously thought, as this story in the New York Times and this one in the Washington Post make clear. If the camp is not requiring that all attendees be vaccinated—and, good lord, not requiring masks either—then you should not let her go."

This well-meaning advice is, unfortunately, completely wrong—or at least completely detached from the science. The two stories linked there discuss how one-third of teens hospitalized with COVID ended up in the ICU, but only after conceding that teenagers are very rarely hospitalized with COVID. But more to the point, those teens weren't vaccinated, unlike the questioner's kid. Very few fully vaccinated people of any age have been hospitalized anywhere, and the overlap of "fully vaccinated" and "teenager" places the kid in one of the lowest-risk groups in existence. Unless they have an autoimmune disorder or some other highly compounding condition, the risk of children and teenagers getting very sick and dying from this thing are incredibly low, even if they're not vaccinated. We've known this for a long time. Yet you can find liberals all over the place fretting over this—again, coming from a good place and acting on a very natural impulse as parents—as not all kids can yet get vaccinated.

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