The Hijacking of Pediatric Medicine
The Free Press | Aaron Sibarium
This long-form piece details what has happened inside the AAP, the nation’s leading organization of pediatricians. It is a stunning, frightening exposé covering everything from politically-driven school closure recommendations, support for mask mandates ignoring harms to child development, conflict-of-interest vaccine promotion, stifling internal dissent, and ignoring vaccine-induced myocarditis risk to support for “gender-affirming care” (puberty blockers, hormones) for minors without parental knowledge or consent. The story “shows how a small group of doctors with virtually unaccountable power can exert tremendous influence over public policy… At stake in all this… is not just lockdowns or puberty blockers but the credibility of the medical establishment itself.”
“Though the organization’s guidelines are framed as the consensus position of the AAP’s members, only a handful of physicians had a role in shaping them. Instead, insiders say, the AAP is deferring to small, like-minded teams of specialists ensconced in children’s hospitals, research centers, and public health bureaucracies, rather than seeking the insights of pediatricians..”
During the pandemic, “from masking toddlers to boosters for 12-year-olds, the group’s guidelines were consistently out of sync with those of the rest of the world, but very much in line with the demands of…[political] partisans.”
Mask mandates— “Prior to the pandemic, the AAP itself had argued that seeing faces is critical for early childhood development.”
Myocarditis— “Multiple AAP higher-ups, including an officer in the cardiology section, which normally reviews all policies related to heart functioning, said their teams were never consulted about the group’s Covid recommendations, including the recommendations about the vaccine. ‘At this point we knew about myocarditis,’ the cardiologist said, ‘but they didn’t ask for our opinion.’”
Trans Issues—There’s a “ broader tension within AAP guidance: On most kitchen table issues, from diet to screen time to exercise, the group has long encouraged a kind of safetyism, stressing the need for parental supervision and the pitfalls of pubescent judgment. Yet on trans issues, it has done nearly the opposite, suggesting that minors are mature enough to transition without their parents’ knowledge or consent.”