How the American Academy of Pediatrics Betrayed Children Everywhere

by: Clayton J. Baker, MD

The prime directive of Western medicine, its golden rule, is expressed by the Latin maxim primum non nocere – first, do no harm. Unfortunately, the Covid era taught us that from the patient’s point of view, a better motto for our times might be caveat emptor – let the buyer beware.

Every medical student is taught that, first and foremost, they should not cause harm to their patients, and every doctor is familiar with this maxim. It is echoed in the Hippocratic Oath and forms the basis for the four pillars of medical ethics: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice.

This rule, and the core tenets of medical ethics that it underpins, were all abandoned during the Covid era. They were replaced with a brutal, inhumane, and unethical martial-law-as-public-health approach to medicine. The results were unconstitutional lockdowns, prolonged school closures, suppression of early treatment, mandated vaccinations, and silencing of dissenting views. These abuses were justified by constant propaganda and lies from public health authorities, the medical establishment, the mainstream media, and medical professional associations.

Enter the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is the largest professional association for pediatricians in the United States. Nearly one hundred years old, the AAP’s motto is “Dedicated to the Health of All Children.” But as with so much of the medical establishment, the Covid era revealed that the AAP has abandoned its stated mission, and in the process, it has betrayed children everywhere.

During the Covid era, no group was harmed more – or more unnecessarily – than children, who lost multiple years of education, socialization, and normal growth and development. Many millions of kids also received the fraudulently tested, toxic, experimental mRNA-based injections that were coercively imposed upon the population at large. Countless children have been harmed or killed by these products, with myocarditis being only the most universally acknowledged of the many toxicities associated with the shots.

Adding insult to injury, it was known from the beginning of the pandemic that the gain-of-function-produced SARS-CoV-2 virus affected children very mildly, rarely causing severe illness, and almost never killing them. Even at the height of the pandemic, an article in the preeminent journal Nature described pediatric Covid deaths as “incredibly rare.” A very large population-based Korean study from 2023 found the case-fatality rate in children from Covid to be well under 1 death in every 100,000 cases.

If no segment of the population was harmed more egregiously than children during the Covid era, few medical organizations betrayed their patient population more thoroughly than the American Academy of Pediatrics.

While the AAP has for many years taken questionable stances on a variety of issues, including the ever-enlarging pediatric vaccine schedule, “gender reassignment,” and others, at one early point during Covid, the AAP did attempt to advocate appropriately in the interest of children. It didn’t last long, however, and a review of this incident shows how the AAP, like so many other medical professional organizations, effectively sold its soul during Covid.

Summer 2020: The AAP Changes Its Tune on In-School Learning

From mid-March 2020, when the Covid lockdowns began, until the end of that school year in June, most American schoolchildren had been kept completely out of school. On July 9, 2020, the AAP released a statement arguing forcefully for the return of American schoolchildren back:

The AAP strongly advocates that all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school. The importance of in-person learning is well-documented, and there is already evidence of the negative impacts on children because of school closures in the spring of 2020.

The July AAP statement went on to say that school closure “places children and adolescents at considerable risk of morbidity and, in some cases, mortality.” It went even further to state that:

the preponderance of evidence indicates that children and adolescents are less likely to be symptomatic and less likely to have severe disease resulting from SARS-CoV-2 infection. In addition, children may be less likely to become infected and to spread infection.

All of these claims the AAP made in July 2020 were known to be true to those who did the proper research (as the AAP apparently had done), and they have been repeatedly and definitively confirmed in the following years.

I was acutely aware of that July 9, 2020, AAP statement. I used it as an important resource in my own advocacy during the summer of 2020 to try to get schools reopened for full-time learning in New York State by the fall. The July AAP document was a well-researched, well-constructed, and well-argued advocacy tool that supported all children’s best interests.

So far, so good. Very soon thereafter, however, the AAP shamefully succumbed to pressure from public health officials, teachers’ unions, and others pushing for continued school closures. By August 19, 2020, with school reopening imminent, the AAP suddenly “revised” their recommendations. The AAP dramatically changed its tune, stating that they would go along with whatever measures public health officials decreed:

…many schools where the virus is widespread will need to adopt virtual lessons and [AAP] is calling for more federal funding to support both models.

“This is on us – the adults – to be doing all the things public health experts are recommending to reduce the spread of the virus,” said AAP President Sara “Sally” H. Goza, M.D., FAAP.

In an act of cowardice and dereliction of duty, the AAP surrendered. It abandoned the strong and sound advocacy for normalizing children’s education contained in its July document. As a physician actively following the issues of the day surrounding Covid and publicly fighting for school reopening, I can testify that nothing changed regarding our knowledge of the virus that justified the AAP’s abdication of its responsibility to children. In fact, multiple foreign countries had already returned children to school without ill effect. The AAP’s capitulation significantly undermined school reopening efforts, especially in Blue states.

The AAP’s sudden and craven volte-face regarding in-school learning was just one of many disgraceful acts committed by medical associations during the Covid era, and it acted to the severe harm of schoolchildren across the nation. Millions of American schoolchildren continued to languish in “remote” or “hybrid” learning for the entire 2020-2021 school year. Many thousands simply dropped out of school, never to return.

In retrospect, the AAP cannot claim that they “didn’t know” enough to push for school reopening. Their July 2020 document proves they knew the correct course of action – before caving in to the establishment’s false narrative, and then subsequently devolving into just one more shameless shill organization, pushing for the mass inoculation of children with the toxic Covid mRNA injections.

Why would the AAP have done such a thing?

Money, for one thing. And plenty of it.

The AAP’s Federal Funding Windfall During Covid

As the Covid vaccine push intensified, the AAP became one of the trusted legacy medical associations that was handsomely rewarded to “push vaccines and combat ‘Misinformation’.” By 2023, the year for which data is most available, the AAP was absolutely raking it in.

As journalist Michael Nevradakis explains:

AAP… received $34,974,759 in government grants during the 2023 fiscal year, according to the organization’s most recent tax disclosure. The grants are itemized in the AAP’s single audit report for 2023-2024.Documents show some of the money was used to advance childhood vaccination in the U.S. and abroad, target medical “misinformation” and “disinformation” online, [and] develop a Regional Pediatric Pandemic Network.

In summary: in July 2020, the AAP ever-so-briefly and correctly sided with the lockdown dissenters, in service of its self-proclaimed motto to serve “the health of all children.” But by mid-August, the AAP switched sides and subsequently got a massive payout to do so. In fiscal 2023 alone, the AAP was receiving $35 million of tax money, much of it directly tied to pushing the Covid mRNA shots in children and to silence dissenters, whom it knew were telling the truth.

Unfortunately, this is unsurprising. Years before Covid, the AAP had already morphed into a highly compromised organization, straying far from its stated goal of being “dedicated to the health of all children.”

The Dinosaurs Sell Themselves to Survive

The business model for the old establishment medical professional organizations, like the AAP, is a dinosaur. The value of paid membership to these organizations has disappeared over the years, causing income from membership fees to fall. Individual paid subscriptions to their flagship journals have nosedived as well. Their financial survival increasingly relies upon Big Pharma largesse and, as we saw above for the AAP during Covid, government payouts.

In return for Big Pharma and government money, these professional organizations function less and less as champions for their professional members and their patients. They become mouthpieces for government initiatives and advertisers for Pharma. If you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor, they have become a strange species of dinosaur-prostitutes.

The AAP in particular is deeply tied to and heavily subsidized by Big Pharma, especially in the area of vaccine promotion.

Starting with the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA), which effectively eliminated tort liability for vaccine manufacturers, the CDC pediatric vaccine schedule has ballooned from 7 vaccines in 1985 to 23 vaccines (and over 70 total doses!) in 2024. Since then, the AAP has largely been in the vaccine promotion business.

In accordance with the CDC vaccine schedules, the Federal government purchases huge quantities of the recommended vaccines from pharmaceutical companies. The shots are promoted to the public and to physicians through well-paid organizations like the AAP, and administered by pediatricians, many of whom receive payment – essentially kickbacks – to do so. Every step of the way, palms are greased.

As a result, American children have become what Dr. Meryl Nass calls “a delivery system to transfer taxpayer funds to big pharmaceutical companies, via your child or grandchild’s arm.”

As HHS Secretary Kennedy recently noted, the AAP posts on its own website its financial indebtedness to its corporate “donors.” Lo and behold, the four top vaccine manufacturers for the products on the pediatric vaccine schedule – Merck, Pfizer, Moderna, and Sanofi – stand at the top of the AAP’s corporate “donor” list. (The total amounts of the payouts the AAP receives are not disclosed.)

The AAP, originally created a century ago to advocate for pediatricians and their patients, has devolved into an advertiser and lobbyist for the corporate interests that fund their operations. So much for “dedicated to the health of all children.”