UCSF's Vinay Prasad Profits from Child COVID-19 Deaths
No Place for Unethical Pestilence Profiteering
There are currently talks of essentially banning the pediatric COVID-19 vaccine on the federal level, after the SARS-CoV-2 virus - which the Trump Administration alleges came from a foreign laboratory - has already killed thousands of American children. Many more have been disabled as well.
These deaths are overwhelmingly in the unvaccinated. There are young faces behind every one of these deaths, often leaving behind parents who deeply regret falling for anti-vaccine propaganda, such as what University of California San Francisco's Vinay Prasad has flooded social media with these past five years.
Vinay Prasad has not apologized for his contributions to these preventable deaths, but instead, gleefully doubled down - even after his myths about a legion of young men harmed by the vaccine failed to materialize. In fact, new research only further confirms the COVID-19 vaccine and regular boosters are safe - from the Journal of Molecular Medicine: “Longitudinal study on immunologic, lipoproteomic, and inflammatory responses indicates the safety of sequential COVID-19 vaccination.” One doubts Prasad will be highlighting this paper on his social media platforms.
Vinay Prasad instead openly celebrated on his Substack the Trump Administration’s proposal to ban the pediatric COVID-19 vaccine, exclaiming: "Good!!!"
"...make no mistake: the CDC should ABSOLUTELY remove COVID-19 from the Childhood Immunization schedule. It if stays, it shows the United States is a corrupt country: because there is no randomized evidence that kids ever benefits (in terms of real clinical outcomes) from this shot, and no evidence of any sort that a kid born today will need one in the future, and this shot earns some companies money."
These are absurd sensationalist proclamations unsupported by evidence, a habit Prasad has imbibed in frequently over the past several years. Let us be definitive: The answer for the number of acceptable child deaths from *all* vaccine-preventable diseases is exactly zero, not "a matter of course" as Prasad has previously exclaimed.
Siezing the Spotlight
For half a decade now, Vinay Prasad has advocated on behalf of SARS-CoV-2 and has fearmongered about the pediatric vaccine since Spring 2021. After COVID-19 had already killed hundreds of American kids in just a year, Prasad wrote an opinion editorial titled "Covid vaccines for children should not get emergency use authorization." Vinay exploited the relatively lower rate of pediatric COVID-19 deaths compared to older population groups, thanks to public health mitigations, to claim that SARS-CoV-2 is harmless for kids and that a vaccine would only put their health at risk. This unfounded fearmongering only sabotaged the work of Vinay Prasad's colleagues in medicine.
Research from 2020 showing blood vessel damage in pediatric COVID-19 patients showed reason for caution, even if kids didn't immediately die from the acute infection. It also disproved claims that COVID-19 is merely a "cold," the long tired anti-vaccine myth Prasad now exclaims repeatedly. Does the below look like what a "cold" does to children?
Prasad has also retweeted anti-vaccine grifter Alex Berenson mocking Andy Slavitt's disabled son, exclaiming that pediatric disability caused by SARS-CoV-2 is the "stupidest fake disease grift ever." Luckily, this view is not widely shared at UCSF:
Not only an indefensibly sadistic sentiment to share, but the unspoken implication here is that Prasad's colleagues at UCSF working in Long COVID research are frauds & scam artists. Vinay regularly attacks pandemic research on Twitter for failing to meet his impossible standards of what he claims is "evidence-based medicine". Is this truly the sort of conduct that the UCSF Administration finds acceptable? Is this truly the example UCSF wants to set for the next generation of doctors & scientists?
It’s worth nothing that Vinay Prasad is not a pediatrician and has zero real-world experience with vaccine development, alongside many other COVID-19 adjacent fields of science he's anointed himself judge of.
Evidence-Free Accusations
However, Vinay has profited a great deal from social media as a public relations manager for the SARS-CoV-2 virus: from Substack subscriptions, YouTube ad revenue, and even writing for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s anti-vax propaganda hub. Abandoning science and medicine, Prasad enjoyed a great deal of fawning attention from conspiracy theorists, conservatives, and fellow travelers in quackery.
In Spring 2023 Vinay Prasad and his ilk, including Kelley Krohnert, a failed web designer from Georgia who misled the public about pediatric COVID-19 from the safety of Substack, and now-FDA Special Assistant Tracy Beth Hoeg, produced a fraudulent paper arguing that the CDC is incompetent & should be disbanded for imagining pediatric COVID-19 deaths.
If you actually bother to read the "paper" for yourself, it's a hastily slapped together mess in which Vinay, Kelley, and Tracy inadvertently admit they are either too ignorant to understand how death reporting works or are actively misleading their captive social media audience in order to incite further baseless hate against doctors, scientists, and public health workers.
Without real evidence, Prasad and his "team" of social media charlatans stumble into accusing not the CDC, but fifty separate state health departments & assorted pediatricians nationwide of simply imagining child COVID-19 deaths. They do this by shamelessly comparing estimates of pediatric flu deaths to pediatric COVID-19 death certificates, in an attempt to legitimize the myth that influenza is worse for kids than COVID-19. This is either willful dishonesty or outrageous incompetence, and either way, neither form of indefensible unprofessionalism has a place in the halls of any medical or scientific institution.
It's unsurprising that Vinay Prasad is being cited by the Trump Administration in press releases to justify their attacks on lifesaving medical and scientific research.
Prasad’s Vicious Cycle of Infinite Profit
Now in 2025 under a second Trump administration and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Vinay Prasad might finally get his wish, and the pediatric COVID-19 vaccine will be essentially banned. This is horrific for a number of reasons. First of all, babies aren't born with natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 - with kids in the age 0-5 group having one of the worst death rates - deaths that a vaccine could have prevented, especially for pregnant mothers.
Instead, Prasad has argued against this vaccine for the pregnant as well.
Vinay Prasad has foolishly insisted that COVID-19 infections confer lifelong immunity, even after kids across America have been reinfected numerous times. Many have tragically developed serious health issues as a result. Denying these well documented harms forms the foundation of Prasad's willfully ignorant opinion that the pediatric SARS-CoV-2 vaccine is "useless." The scientific truth is that immunity to COVID-19 short-lasting & wanes. As new variants continue to emerge, an updated vaccine remains one of the best forms of protection against COVID-19.
Without a regularly updated pediatric COVID-19 vaccine during future epidemic waves ripping through schools, you will see an uptick of children getting very sick, hospitalized, disabled, & tragically killed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Vinay Prasad financially benefits from this outcome.
As pediatric death & disability from COVID-19 inevitably rises, doctors & scientists will attempt to warn the public and insist on deploying mitigations to prevent transmission amongst kids and teachers. Vinay then gets to profit from slinging insults and smears social media, across Substack and Youtube and Twitter, and inciting harassment and threats against "idiots" whose job it is to prevent such harms. Such exploitative, childish behavior is a total betrayal of the entire medical profession, completely unethical, and is a stain upon the reputation of UCSF.
What Can We Do About This?
As medicine and science come under fire from the Trump Administration, one of the first things universities need to do in order to fortify themselves against censorship and sabotage is upholding professional standards. That means kicking anti-vaccine provocateurs to the curb, upholding academic freedom and scientific inquiry over cowardly submission to bad-faith exploitation of a global crisis. Anyone who profits from fearmongering about a lifesaving vaccine has no place in any serious scientific or medical institution, especially when their priority is being RFK Jr.’s cheerleader.
As we've written before, you should contact the UCSF Office of Faculty and Academic Affairs who are tasked with addressing faculty misconduct.
Following that, you should contact the UCSF School of Medicine Chairs and demand accountability for their faculty member misleading parents about the pediatric COVID-19 vaccine for personal profit and how grossly unethical this is.
On top of that, you should contact the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland and ask the administration their thoughts on their fellow UCSF colleague's years of profiteering from sabotaging their essential work.
It would also be worth contacting UCSF's Office of COVID-Related Research and ask how researchers like Alison Cohen and Michael Peluso feel about their work being described by a public-facing UCSF faculty member as a "stupid fake disease grift."
Over the years, we've compiled numerous indefensible statements by Vinay Prasad against doctors and scientists. Consider forwarding any of these to UCSF's Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination, as Prasad identifies himself as a member of UCSF Faculty on social media and incites harassment & threats from his dedicated anti-vaccine & conspiracy theorist fanbase against his colleagues.
Permitting this continued misconduct does nothing but enforce a culture of censorship amongst doctors & scientists who actually do the work instead of simply running their mouths on social media. During this critical period of our history, it's crucial to remind these institutions that their obligation is to serve the public, not the whims of the Trump Administration - of which Prasad is a dedicated defender of.
Consider contacting your local public health departments and demand they remind the public about the need of the pediatric COVID-19 vaccine, as well as your political representatives to defend this lifesaving vaccine. Consult our compilations of peer-reviewed medical research on COVID-19's impacts on pediatric health and development if you need evidence to cite:
If we can prevent just a single parent from falling for anti-vaccine, pro-virus propaganda before it's too late, then our efforts will have been worth it. Thank you.
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