https://www.yahoo.com/news/false-claim-cdc-require-covid-233344660.html
False claim that CDC would require covid vaccines for kids spurs outrage
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 online.
"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 program, 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.
"This is an all new level of dangerous misinformation," Jerome 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."
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