  The energy loss of a rotationally powered pulsar is primarily carried away as
electromagnetic radiation and a particle wind. Considering that the magnetic
field strength of pulsars ranges from about $10^8$ to $10^{15}$ G, one could
expect quantum electrodynamics (QED) to play a role in their spin-down,
especially for strongly magnetized ones (magnetars). In fact several authors
have argued that QED corrections will dominate the spin-down for slowly
rotating stars. They called this effect quantum vacuum friction (QVF). However,
QVF was originally derived using a problematic self-torque technique, which
leads to a dramatic overestimation of this spin-down effect. Here, instead of
using QVF, we explicitly calculate the energy loss from rotating neutron stars
using the Poynting vector and a model for a particle wind, and we include the
QED one-loop corrections. We express the excess emission as QED one-loop
corrections to the radiative magnetic moment of a neutron star. We do find a
small component of the spin-down luminosity that originates from the vacuum
polarization. However, it never exceeds one percent of the classical magnetic
dipole radiation in neutron stars for all physically interesting field
strengths. Therefore, we find that the radiative corrections of QED are
irrelevant in the energetics of neutron-star spin-down.
