[gfodor]

This feels like pure revisionism. The purpose of the vaccination programs for children is not to prevent severe disease or death, though that is a nice benefit. The purpose, and manifested effect, is to maintain population herd immunity due to the fact these vaccines radically reduce the chance of the child acting as a vector. The consequence is a vastly reduced incidence rate across the whole population due to this network effect vs a scenario with no mandate. This was widely understood to be the ethical justification for mandating these vaccines: it led to a collective benefit, counterfactually preventing massive suffering across many individual, a benefit which outweighs the risk to the individual from taking these drugs. This fundamental premise is entirely not the case for this vaccine program, which does not come close to helping with herd immunity for a disease we now acknowledge is endemic, and also happens to have a wildly different relative risk profile for children vs the other vaccines we mandate.