CNBC.com reported Monday:

Florida parent Judi Hayes said she can’t wait to get her 10-year-old son, Will, back in the classroom. However, she’s holding out until he can get vaccinated.

“He’s sad. He misses his friends and his teachers and special Olympics tennis,” said Hayes, whose child has Down syndrome and has been doing virtual learning since the onset of the pandemic in spring 2020.

Lora Vail, a parent in Florida, said she isn’t hesitant about getting her 6-year-old son, Cooper, vaccinated. She and her husband are already fully vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine, and she has an appointment to get a booster dose.

“We’re looking forward to when we can get our son vaccinated as well so he will be protected, and can protect others,” she said.

But on Sunday Dr. Ben Carson, Housing and Urban Development Secretary under President Donald Trump and former director of pediatric neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, criticized Covid-19 vaccinations for children ages 5 to 11.

“The fact of the matter is, the mortality rate for children from COVID-19 is 0.025, which is very similar to the rate for seasonal flu. And we haven’t been for years and years going through all these things for seasonal flu. Plus, we don’t know what the long-term impact of these vaccines is. So this is really sort of a giant experiment. Do we want to put our children at risk, when we know that the risk of the disease to them is relatively small, but we don’t know what the future risks are? Why would we do a thing like that? It makes no sense whatsoever.”

Today’s read is from Rob Jenkins, a 35-year veteran of higher education as a professor and former administrator, a regular contributor to several national and regional publications, and the author of six books. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Frankly, it’s appalling to see how fanatically eager some parents are to inject their children with the experimental gene therapy, like so many lab rats.

These days, many parents seem to be clambering up onto their children’s shoulders, desperate to save themselves.

Because, make no mistake, that is largely what is driving this insane push to inoculate pre-adolescents: adults’ irrational fear—not for their children, who are at virtually no risk from the virus, but for themselves. And by “adults,” I mean not just parents but teachers, school administrators, doctors, and others who ought to be protecting kids, not their own miserable skins.

Read Jenkins’ entire column here.