Until Wednesday, unvaccinated children were still used as an excuse to not fully reopen schools, so it was something else to see on Monday when MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell wondered how the U.S. could morally allow American teenagers to get vaccinated while, on the other side of the world, India has been in the throes of a devastating COVID crisis.
Mitchell’s questioning comes as Pfizer and Moderna are seeking authorization to be able to administer vaccines to everybody over the age of 12, “And we’re expecting a Pfizer decision on 12-to-15-year-olds. How do we justify that? I know how important it is to families all over America to have their kids vaccinated, especially high school kids before school opens, but we’re — are we doing enough for India?”
Brown University’s Dr. Ashish Jha would promptly dismantle this nonsense, but he first granted her a point that the U.S. needs to more: “I think we’re not doing enough for the world or enough for India and again I think the Biden Administration has taken some very strong steps and I always commend them for the good work they’ve done, they’ve got to do a lot more.”
Jha then pointed out how Mitchell had no reason to worry as this age range was actually such a small sliver of the population: “I don’t want to confuse this with the 12-to-15 issue, the 12-to-15 year-olds make up a small number of people. You know, total there are about 15 million kids in that age range, even if we end up, let’s say, vaccinating half of them in the next few weeks, that’s a couple of days of vaccine supply. That’s not a huge deal.”
Put simply, Mitchell conflated two different topics and thus provided a false choice. This was an example of where two things can be true at once in seeing a vital need to help out a struggling country like India and how doing so would help squash the pandemic on a global stage, but also believe that there would be plenty of vaccine doses to cover that part of the population.
In the past, she has used her show to urge schools to remain closed and criticized Republicans who want to reopen them and this would be just another opportunistic move to keep them closed indefinitely.
This segment was sponsored by Applebee’s. Their contact information is linked.
Here is a transcript for the May 10 show:
MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports
May 12, 2021
12:45 PM ETANDREA MITCHELL: And we’re expecting a Pfizer decision on 12-to-15-year-olds. How do we justify that? I know how important it is to families all over America to have their kids vaccinated, especially high school kids before school opens, but we’re — are we doing enough for India?
ASHISH JHA: I think we’re not doing enough for the world. I don’t think we’re doing enough for India and again I think the Biden administration has taken some very strong steps and I always commend them for the good work they’ve done, they’ve got to do a lot more. I don’t want to confuse this with the 12-to-15 issue, the 12-to-15 year-olds make up a small number of people. You know, total there are about 15 million kids in that age range, even if we end up, let’s say, vaccinating half of them in the next few weeks, that’s a couple of days of vaccine supply. That’s not a huge deal. The bigger strategy for the Biden administration right now has got to be how do we ramp up vaccinations even further and get more doses out to India.