The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has shut down Tucker Carlson’s false claims that the agency is gearing up to make Covid vaccination mandatory for public school children.
During a Tuesday night segment, the Fox News host made his first incorrect assertion by mischaracterising a Thursday meeting of the CDC’s advisory committee, who he said would be voting on whether to make Covid immunisations mandatory for school-age children to attend public institutions.
The next day the CDC took to Twitter to correct the record.
“Thursday, CDC’s independent advisory committee (ACIP) will vote on an updated childhood immunization schedule,” they wrote. “States establish vaccine requirements for school children, not ACIP or CDC.”
The Thursday meeting for the federal agency’s ACIP, as they point out, was not to issue any federal mandates – which is outside their purview – but an annual gathering where they would reassess which vaccines doctors should recommend to their patients.
That list, which does not dictate state laws or requirements, includes vaccine recommendations and their according schedules, such as immunizations for polio, measles, mumps and rubella, diphtheria and others.
The agency then linked out to its website, where it specifically discusses how “state laws establish vaccination requirements for school children,” not the CDC.
“These laws often apply not only to children attending public schools but also to those attending private schools and day care facilities,” the CDC website reads.
Mr Carlson, not taking kindly to being indirectly shamed by the federal agency, nor also receiving a disclaimer by Twitter after they fact-checked his segment, went on the offensive on Wednesday night.
After he continued to air falsehoods, alleging that scientists from the federal agency would be voting on Thursday about whether children would be required to get a shot that would then determine if they could be educated in the United States, he laid out his attack against the CDC plainly.
“In response to our segment, the CDC complained on Twitter,” he said. “They claimed that states and not the CDC establish vaccine requirements for school children.
“But like so much else that we have heard from the CDC, and it pains us to say this but it’s true, like so much else that they’ve told us over the past few years, they’re lying and they know they’re lying.”
Mr Carlson then went on to pull up graphics that showed snippets of various states policies when it came to immunisation requirements for public schools.
Virginia, he pointed out, writes on their health department website that “vaccines must be administered in accordance with the harmonised schedule of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
He then cited similar instances in Massachusetts and Tennessee, seeming to miss the point in the text where the various state health agencies were stipulating their own requirements and were simply referring back to the CDC’s recommendations for when and how those vaccines should be doled out.
“More than a dozen states follow the CDC’s immunisation schedule to set vaccination requirements, not suggestions, requirements for children to be educated,” he incorrectly deduced.
“The point is the CDC sets the standard and then it becomes required across the country and of course they already know that,” he closed before asserting once more that the federal agency was knowingly lying.
Should the CDC vote to include the Covid vaccine in its list of recommended vaccinations for children six months of age and older, then it would likely result in more states adding the jab as a mandatory inoculation before starting school.
