Chicago City Wire

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is still encouraging Chicago parents to make their children get COVID-19 jabs.

That's in the face of a New York State study of 365,000 jabbed children aged 5-11 that showed they were 40 percent more likely to be infected by COVID-19 than those that hadn't received one.

"Getting your children vaccinated is free, simple and the most effective way of preventing them from getting COVID-19," she wrote on Twitter Sunday.

The New York study was released Feb. 28. Its authors still said parents should get their children jabbed, but said drug companies should give them a higher dose than is typically recommended.

Dr. Madhava Setty, who writes for Children's Health Defense, said that "vaccine effectiveness is lower in children because they are already protected."

"One reason why (vaccine effectiveness) is so low in children is that they are more resistant to infection to begin with," he wrote. "There are multiple reasons for this, including natural immunity."

"Data from this large group of children in New York demonstrate the COVID vaccine provides little, if any, protection from SARS-COV2 infection. This is not surprising given the rapid emergence of the Omicron variant," Setty wrote. "This same data indicate unvaccinated children are already protected from infection, obviating the need for any form of prophylaxis in this age group. Hence, any proposal to increase dosing is not only unnecessary, it invites greater risk of harm."

"With such marginal and diminishing benefits, continuing to vaccinate cannot be justified," he said.

Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Controls (CDC) said last week that COVID-19 vaccines aren't effective against variants of the virus like Omicron.