Pediatricians are one of the most essential pillars of American medicine. They safeguard the health of our youngest and most vulnerable, they administer vaccines that offer strong protection against horrible diseases that have claimed so many young lives in the past, and their competence can settle the nerves of anxious patients. Most importantly: they save children so they can grow up to live out full and complete lives. The nation owes our pediatricians a debt of gratitude for their continued service.
Advocates of mass infection of unvaccinated children with SARS-CoV-2 will never acknowledge that the nation faced a severe shortage of pediatric ICU (pICU) specialists in 2020, and continue to do so to this day, especially in rural areas. As children’s bodies are generally smaller & less developed than adult bodies, pICU specialists come equipped with the knowledge & experience of how to manage dosages, treatments, and so on for these young & vulnerable lives. Had we mass infected tens of millions of unvaccinated American children with SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, we would have had countless thousands dead that year alone instead of merely 200, and many millions more disabled.
Let us also not forget how many children suffered through the trauma of losing a parent because they brought the virus home from school. On February 03rd, 2022 UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital (@UCSFChildrens) tweeted out the following: “With Delta, we saw that for every 4 deaths from COVID, a child lost a parent or caregiver - and losses were greatest for children of color.” Attached is a slide which reads: “1 in 500 children in U.S. has had a COVID-19-associated death of a parent or grandparent caregiver.” This tragedy would play out hundreds of thousands of times across America. Clearly, there is no room for childish, immature antics when it comes to these matters.
Pediatrics is a highly specialized and technical field of medicine, and those who dedicate their careers to it should be respected with humility, instead of overruled by loudmouthed social media charlatans.
The Public Face of Pediatrics at UCSF
The University of California San Francisco (UCSF) has an impressive pediatrics department, with a dedicated faculty page. I searched high and low across this webpage multiple times, and strangely enough, I did not find the name of the most outspoken “expert” on matters of children’s health among the UCSF faculty. Anyone who has read the PAI for long enough knows who I’m talking about: Oncologist Vinay Prasad, who was recently ousted from the Food & Drug Administration for choosing to be an erratic, abusive crank & falsely claiming in an intentionally leaked memo that the COVID-19 vaccine killed at least 10 American children.
In a recent interview with libertarian rag “Reason,” titled “Public Health is so Broken,” Prasad insisted, with no evidence, that corrupt saboteurs in the FDA simply “changed the report” after Big Pharma conspired to force him, Makary, and Hoeg out. Prasad produced no evidence for this claim, or his claim that the COVID-19 vaccine killed children, which is now considered fact in the canon of anti-vaccine circles.
Prasad has seamlessly returned to UCSF and is back to ranting incoherently on social media, pretending that he’s still on the MAHA team. This is after Trump & RFK Jr. kicked him to the curb for simultaneously being both erratic and incompetent. Yet he is still on his knees for them, immediately after being publicly humiliated.
For Sensible Medicine, Vinay Prasad has penned a new screed titled: “The best person to discuss vaccines with is... your pediatrician: Hmm… Really?” In it, Prasad mocks the pre-MAHA 2024 vaccine schedule, calling it in his words: “#vintage” before attacking the annual COVID-19 and flu vaccines. Yes, we seriously have someone with a medical license arguing that it would be better if thousands of more Americans died every year without the protection of a flu vaccine and repeatedly claiming that the COVID-19 killed children with zero evidence. This is the public face of pediatrics at the University of California San Francisco, constantly attacking pediatricians.
The question which must be answered is simple: Does the UCSF Pediatrics Department share and endorse Vinay Prasad’s views?
Prasadiatrics 101
Perhaps the faculty members of the UCSF Pediatrics Department need a reminder of just a few of the countless obscene & blatantly unscientific things their colleague, Oncologist Vinay Prasad, has said when it comes to pediatrics & COVID-19:
January 13th, 2021: “Let me be perfectly clear: children DO NOT NEED a sars-cov-2 vaccine” - The overwhelming majority of pediatric COVID-19 deaths are in unvaccinated children, numbering in the thousands in America alone.
February 03rd, 2021: Prasad publishes an opinion editorial titled “Kids don’t need COVID-19 vaccines to return to school” in STAT News. This is long before vaccines for American children are approved, and over 200 American children had already died of COVID-19.
January 09th, 2022: For Tablet, Prasad pens a depraved screed titled: “The Cult of Masked Schoolchildren: History will not look kindly on our evidence-free decision to make kids suffer most.” The evidence of COVID-19’s extensive harms on children, with Long COVID overtaking asthma to become the leading chronic illness in children, is now overwhelming and undeniable.
January 30th, 2022: “Everything done to keep kids ‘safe’ has been delusional, unproven, harmful mitigation that is not proportionate to the risks they face, harmful to their language and development, and has hurt a generation more than any other insult this century. The left failed kids. End of story.” Prasad has consistently, year after year, denied any of the many well-documented harms of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to children, up to even orphanhood and death.
February 02nd, 2022: For conservative rag Unherd, Prasad published with anti-vaccine quack Alison Krug: “Should we let children catch Omicron? Restrictions in school must never return”
Februrary 08th, 2022: “Yes, COVID is on par with Flu in terms of risk to kids, but more to the point, the amount of restrictions we placed on children is in now way whatsoever commensurate with their risk of COVID. We restructured their entire lives, and deprived them of a year of education. Horrible.” Yet again, COVID-19 has hospitalized, disabled, and killed exponentially more children than flu between 2022 and the time of this posting, and disabled countless more. Prasad simply denies this physical reality. His delusions render him mentally unfit to serve in any sort of medical, scientific, or academic role.
May 3rd, 2022: Vinay Prasad publishes an editorial titled: “Don’t panic about unvaccinated kids.” The overwhelming majority of COVID-19 deaths are in unvaccinated children. A UCSF Faculty member, who is not a pediatrician, is profiting from sabotaging the work of the UCSF Pediatrics department and ensuring that children die of vaccine-preventable causes.
July 21st, 2022: “Any strong advocate for Kids covid vaccination is off their rocker.” This is after COVID-19 has killed over 1,000 children, and we will record over 2,000 deaths before the year’s end. Overwhelmingly unvaccinated. Would the UCSF Pediatrics department like to clarify just how many vaccine-preventable child deaths they consider acceptable? Also, it is wildly unprofessional to imply that vaccine advocates are mentally unwell in a public medical debate, however, this is a common anti-vaccine trope.
October 24th, 2022: Realizing that telling parents not to vaccinate their children against one infectious disease might transfer to other infectious diseases, Prasad decides to blame vaccine advocates for the consequences of his own actions, writing on Substack: “Covid Vaccines Shouldn’t Be Routine for Kids - The CDC’s latest guidelines could wind up lowering vaccination rates for truly dangerous diseases, like polio and measles.” Prasad would gleefully go on to endorse and serve under Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. - who has called measles a “blessing:”
Yet, the UCSF Pediatrics Department continues to quietly let their fellow faculty member loudly speak over them.
March 2th, 2023: After publishing a dishonest & fraudulent paper (which is never subjected to peer review) alleging that the CDC (and 50 state health deparments, pediatricians, etc.) hallucinated pediatric COVID-19 deaths - playing to his anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist social media fanbase - Prasad screeches: “This is damning stuff. CDC should be dismantled if it cannot accurately report the number of kids dead from covid. This is a basic competency and CDC failed.” Just how well is a dismantled CDC working out for America in 2026?
March 31st, 2023: Cherry picking a single study from one of his Twitter fanboys, Prasad posts to Substack: “Bombshell: New Study on Long COVID in kids and young adults FAILS to link COVID to Long COVID” - in reality, there is a mountain of evidence showing that COVID-19 has caused what is now the leading chronic illness in American children. Prasad’s inability to accept evidence which contradicts his opinions renders him unfit to serve in a medical, scientific, and academic capacity. There are a number of great researchers at UCSF doing work on Long COVID, and their voices are being drowned out by Prasad’s screeching. It is the job of every faculty member at UCSF to bring up this misconduct to the administration and file a formal complaint.
May 11th, 2023: “Reopening schools in 2020 did not require HVACs nor testing nor ‘high quality’ kiddo’s masks. It required absolutely nothing besides will. Ala Sweden.” This is another blatantly false statement. American schools went remote because dozens of educators died of COVID-19 in a few short weeks in NYC in Spring 2020. Dead teachers can educate zero children. Also, schools shut down all over Sweden, and a third of young adults are now suffering from cognitive impairment.
August 26th, 2024: “Covid is just a cold; incompetent leaders forced schools to close.” This is an anti-vaccine meme the originates from the very beginning of the pandemic in 2020.
October 25th, 2024: Prasad endorses Scott Atlas for the millionth time, tweeting: “[Scott Atlas’] only crime was being right.” Scott Atlas is a Stanford radiologist and former Trump Administration official. In 2020, he championed the mass infection of a new SARS virus in unvaccinated children:
Neither Atlas nor Prasad could be found treating children hospitalized for COVID-19.
A Plea to the UCSF Pediatrics Department
Faculty members of the UCSF Pediatrics department, you need to understand that your continued silence is an endorsement of Vinay Prasad’s obnoxious, sadistic, and utterly unscientific misconduct. Worse yet, it means that you consider the vaccine-preventable deaths of children to be acceptable. It is your professional responsibility to publicly rebuke Prasad and file a formal complaint with the administration of your university. If this is what you truly consider acceptable, then perhaps you should be honest with the public and rename your department to “Prasadiatrics,” because you clearly don’t care about children. You care about protecting the ego of a pathetic excuse for a man.
In fact, let’s have the UCSF administration lay off their entire faculty. Have Prasad teach every class and replace the curriculum with his social media rants. Better yet, train a legion of generative A.I. chatbots off his endless hours of social media rants to educate the next generation of doctors and scientists, so Prasad doesn’t have to take any time away from producing more harmful & deceptive screeds to get more children killed of vaccine-preventable causes.
There are countless parents across America who have to live with the trauma of burying their child because they listened to men like Prasad, and did not vaccinate their kid against COVID-19. This is the public face of pediatrics at the University of California San Francisco. Are you proud of him?
Do They Really Think This is Acceptable?
Reader, if you’ve made it this far, I humbly ask you to go to the faculty page of the UCSF pediatrics department and reach out to these professors. Especially if you are a fellow pediatrician. Ask them what they think of Prasad’s blatant dishonesty, including repeatedly making evidence-free claims that the COVID-19 vaccine killed children; both as an employee of the federal government and as a faculty member of the University of California San Francisco. Be polite, be professional, but do ask them why they are silent in the face of such blatantly harmful academic misconduct.
Just as the general public has an obligation to defend doctors and scientists from unjust attacks and defamation, the medical profession has an obligation to the public to police their own. The vast majority of workplaces in America would never tolerate these sorts of antics, so why is it somehow acceptable at one of America’s top medical schools? It’s a vulgar insult to hardworking families across this nation.
No child should have to lose their life because a gullible parent fell for manipulative lies on social media from someone with official looking credentials by their name.
In a just society, Vinay Prasad would be screeching out of a cardboard box under a freeway overpass for the rest of his days; a depraved little narcissistic twerp who destroyed his professional reputation in pursuit of social media fame. The next generation of doctors and scientists shouldn’t be deceived into thinking he is some sort of role model to emulate. We deserve better.
Get a load of this: the Chancellor of UCSF is a pediatrician (https://share.google/LEn2OiCXseZlhoOOb) . I've written him about Prasad and no response.
I've written the American Academy of Pediatrics about how they need to stop letting anti-vaxxers crap all over their Facebook page and again no response. I don't know what TF is wrong with pediatric leaders in the US, but it's terrifying they're just sitting on their asses. The last time the AAP directly challenged any anti-vaccine groups was in 2011 when they called out Delta airlines for airing anti-vaccine ads by the NVIC. Since then they've been silent. They won't even denounce anti-vaccine FAAP pediatricians like Bob Sears and Paul Thomas who should have immediately been expelled under AAP bylaws. I quit the AAP in 2012 because I'm not going to pay money to a group that does jack shit against antivax groups and anti-vax pediatricians.
Thank you for this essay. I was starting to feel like I'm all by myself on this.