Martha Fulford, J. Edward Les and Pooya Kazemi

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. 

Throughout North America, it is not uncommon to encounter parents who are absolutely terrified of their children contracting COVID. This is because many parents significantly overestimate the potential harms of COVID to their children.

These parents are overcome by worry despite massive amounts of reassuring medical data that tell us that children are very unlikely to be harmed by this virus.

Much of the blame for this can be laid at the feet of biased and distorted media coverage — coverage that should be deemed misinformation, but which seems to get a free pass from “fact-checkers” and from many in the public.

We are not trying to draw moral or any other equivalencies to misinformation being spread by anti-vaxxers or COVID-deniers. We have many words of reproach for these people, too, but plenty has already been written about them.