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Global health advocate Chelsea Clinton was slammed online after she announced The Big Catch-Up Initiative, which will be the "largest childhood immunization effort ever." On May 8, a Twitter user named @TheChiefNerd shared a video of the 43-year-old personality explaining how, through the initiative, they aim to "catch as many kids up as possible" for the jab with or without parental consent.
"We need the public sector to hopefully stop doing things like stripping away public health emergency powers from state public health agencies...We're working with WHO and The Gates Foundation and others to hopefully have the largest childhood immunization effort ever over the next 18 months to catch as many kids up as possible."
The news was first announced on April 24 via a joint press release on WHO's website by UNICEF, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, along with Immunization Agenda 2030 and many other global and national health partners.
Soon after the video clip of Clinton explaining the initiative and their plan for the kids went viral, netizens began sharing a screenshot of a news article by The People's Voice with the headline, "Chelsea Clinton: 'It's Time To Force-Jab Every Unvaccinated Child in America.'" One of the users criticized her by stating:
Twitter reactions on Chelsea Clinton's child immunization effort
After Chelsea Clinton's plan for The Big Catch-Up Initiative went viral, Twitterati was furious. Several users slammed the health advocate for forcing children to take immunization jabs, with one even questioning if she was a physician to make such rules.
Others compared her to demons for Chelsea Clinton's choice of words and motive behind the immunization initiative and asked the big agencies behind it to do it to their kids first.
"I think we are less prepared today than we were in January 2020": Clinton
Since the beginning of the pandemic, millions of children worldwide have missed some or all of their required vaccinations, 25 million in 2021 alone, per the WHO.
While speaking at the Brainstorm Health conference by Fortune held in Marina del Rey, California, in April 2023, Chelsea Clinton said that vaccine hesitancy and outright rejection have been "unfortunate" during the coronavirus pandemic.
“No one should die of polio, measles, or pneumonia—including in this country, where we also need people to vaccinate their kids."
Clinton, who said that the initiative would last for 18 months, added that the world is less prepared for another pandemic than it was before this one.
“I think we are less prepared today than we were, arguably, in January 2020—partially because of the lack of trust and confidence in not only our scientists, but in science itself, and certainly in public health professionals. We all deserve to hopefully not be as unprepared as I worry we are at the moment.”
As per the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as of December 31, 2022, only 10% of U.S. children ages six months to four years had gotten one or more COVID shots.
Moreover, In the United States, children under the age of 2 were not even 70% of the population to have had all recommended vaccinations against illnesses, including diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, measles, and others that were widespread before the advent of vaccines in the years 2020–2021.
