Be Like Publix

If you don’t live in the south, you may not know about Publix. But Publix Super Market, Inc., is a popular grocery store chain that is headquartered in Lakeland, Florida. They currently have 1,293 stores, which are located in 7 states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.

The supermarket chain has a pharmacy in many of their stores. Publix Pharmacies services “are more than just medicine,” the company advertises.

So, when COVID-19 vaccines first became available, Publix was one of the places Americans who wanted the vaccines flocked to. Publix pharmacies offered vaccines to adults once they were approved, and later these pharmacies made the vaccines available for children as well.

But now the Lakeland-based grocery chain is saying it will **NOT** offer COVID-19 vaccinations to children under five “at this time,” even though the vaccines have now been authorized for “emergency use” in America for ages 6 months to five years old.

The company is not giving its reasons for refusing to offer the vaccine to the under five set. But Florida’s Harvard-educated Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, M.D./Ph.D., has “officially recommended against the COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children,” as reported by the Tampa Bay Times.

Interestingly, Walmart—a behemoth big box store—will not be offering the vaccines to babies ages 6 months to 35 months of age. However, Walmart will be giving the vaccines to children ages 36 months and older.

So why is Publix refusing to offer COVID-19 vaccines for children under five? And why is Walmart refusing to offer COVID-19 vaccines to toddlers or infants?

Since Publix is not disclosing its reasoning to the public, we can only speculate.

My best guess:

Publix is paying attention to the science. Every single scientific indication shows that babies and toddlers should not be getting this vaccine. There’s no reason to give it to them and there’s no evidence that the vaccines are helpful to this age group. At the same time, however, there are what one doctor described to me as “blaring” safety signals that the vaccines are not safe, especially for young adults and teens.

The United States is the only country in the world that has authorized vaccines for this age group to date. We are also in the top ten countries with the worst health outcomes and the most deaths from COVID-19 per capita. This means our public health authorities have failed. Publix, like the rest of America, is beginning to wake up. So instead of blinding trusting our misguided health authorities, the owners of Publix are using their own brains and doing their own research. That research shows that the vaccine is so unsafe for babies that medical doctors are now saying that giving it to them is criminal. (See #1.)

Publix doesn’t want to hurt babies. The truth is that no childhood vaccines should be given at supermarket pharmacies. Vaccines need to be administered in a doctor’s office where the baby’s health history and individual risk factors have already been assessed. That way the baby can be treated or quickly transferred to the hospital in the event that he or she suffers a bad reaction. I’m thinking that maybe Publix knows that babies will have bad reactions—because they will—and the super market chain doesn’t want to have their pharmacists be the ones who hurt the babies. Or maybe they just don’t want to be held liable.

It’s time for every business, every family, every scientist, and every doctor to push back. Be like Publix. Stand your ground against our stunningly hypocritical regulatory agencies that keep putting profits over people, time and time again.