Scotiabank Arena to host mass COVID-19 vaccination clinic for young kids Dec. 12
When Dr. Michael Poon, a pediatrician with Kids Care Pediatric Practice in Woonsocket, learned about his own family’s risk of contracting COVID-19 and being unable to get the vaccine required to protect them, he thought it was a sign of the times that he’d be the one to provide it for them.
“I’m a pediatrician and I’ve been practicing for about 30 years, so I have a lot of experience with vaccines and how important they are to protect children,” said Poon.
When asked what’s changed in the last two months to make him feel this way, Poon said the government’s mishandling of the pandemic has changed his mind.
“I think we’re seeing now that there are significant risks to kids from vaccine preventable diseases,” explained Poon. “I’m not talking about immunizations and vaccinations, I’m talking about illnesses like whooping cough and meningitis where we had a large number of cases [that] we had just in the last few weeks.”
Poon is working as a clinical assistant for a small clinic in Massachusetts and is a member of the Massachusetts State Medical Society and the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Pediatric Vaccines and Immunizations.
Massachusetts, like the other 29 states, require parents to be fully vaccinated against common childhood illnesses with the MMRV vaccine or whooping cough with the conjugate vaccine.
However, in the last two months, the number of vaccine-preventable cases of whooping cough has tripled to at least 30 reported cases. At that same time, the number of children with the measles, mumps and rubella virus has dropped to zero.
When asked if the parents had
