Pharma and government health officials are luring parents and teens into getting the vaccine by promising a return to social events and normal life — while ignoring potential harms and the “miniscule” risk COVID poses to children.
By Children’s Health Defense Team
A decade ago, Ohio researchers bemoaned the difficulty of recruiting children for clinical trials. In the article, “Pediatric Drug-Trial Recruitment: Enticement Without Coercion,” published in the journal Pediatrics, researchers identified barriers such as “the challenge of determining appropriate payments for participation that are not coercive,” “the need to obtain consent from parents” and “ethical concerns.”
With COVID-19, it appears the government and pharma may have determined they can simply leapfrog over these pesky obstacles.
On May 10, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) extended the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID vaccine to adolescents 12 through 15 years of age.
The FDA committee that steered the decision chose to ignore urgent warnings from around the world about the vaccine’s risks for children, including a letter by 93 Israeli doctors who wrote in April that “not even a handful of children should be endangered through mass vaccination against a disease that is not dangerous to them.”
According to a recent New York Times article, “For children, the evidence so far does not offer much reason for alarm about COVID-19’s long-term effects.” Conversely, the Israeli doctors and other experts have emphasized that “it cannot be ruled out that the vaccine will have long-term adverse effects that have not yet been discovered at this time, including on growth, reproductive system or fertility.”
Warnings ignored
Notwithstanding warnings about COVID vaccine risks for children, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) followed up with an immediate endorsement of FDA’s EUA expansion, and CDC director Rochelle Walensky called on healthcare providers to begin administering the still-investigational vaccine to younger adolescents “right away.”
Incredibly, a CDC committee* also gave providers permission to administer the COVID vaccines with other childhood and adolescent vaccines “without regard to timing” — including “simultaneous administration of COVID-19 and other vaccines on the same day, as well as co-administration within 14 days.”
The CDC is basing this incautious advice on the unproven assumption that “adverse event profiles are generally similar when vaccines are administered simultaneously as when they are administered alone,” even though the agency also admits that it does not know “whether so-called ‘reactogenicity’ increases with [vaccine] co-administration.”
The shockingly cavalier promotion of a no-holds-barred approach to COVID vaccination for America’s children flies in the face of global vaccine experts’ collective opinion (expressed at a World Health Organization meeting in December 2019) that vaccine safety science and safety monitoring are flawed and utterly inadequate.
No less an entity than the Institute of Medicine has stated that systematic research on “key elements of the entire [childhood vaccine] schedule — the number, frequency, timing, order, and age at administration of vaccines” — has never been done.CHD Calls on FDA to Take COVID Vaccines Off the Market – Submit a Comment
Bypassing payment
Returning to the recruitment obstacles outlined in the 2011 Pediatrics article, it appears that in lieu of “payment” for participation in Pfizer’s mass vaccine trial, the strategy deployed by Walensky and others is to entice adolescents with sunny assurances of a “faster return to social activities.”
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla and FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock have likewise promised youngsters that COVID vaccination equals a return to a “sense of normalcy.”
These pledges seem to be just the ticket for socially starved teens who profess to be “all ready to get [the vaccine]” and “excited to get things going again” after being “locked up for a year.”
Six hundred thousand 12- to 15-year-olds rushed to get COVID jabs within the first week of the EUA expansion. Counting the 16- and 17-year-olds who had previously received Pfizer’s vaccine, the total number of injected adolescents (ages 12-17) now numbers 4.1 million, Walensky announced.
These teens and families were likely unaware of the serious adverse events — such as blood clots and Guillain-Barré syndrome — already being experienced by those 16 and older. After a 17-year-old Utah athlete developed blood clots in his brain one day after receiving his first Pfizer injection, the basketball player’s mother tearfully aired her buyer’s remorse, stating her son was “healthy and well before” and “the hardest thing was, I let him get that shot.”
Nor are most parents and teens focusing on the fact that accepting one COVID injection will not be the end of the story. COVID booster shots are already in the offing — introducing the prospect of recurrent and cumulative risks.
Bypassing parents
As the above-cited numbers suggest, a significant proportion of parents seem to be on board with their kids’ swift compliance. In April, just prior to the EUA expansion, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll tested the waters and found 30% of parents with children in the 12-15 age group were themselves chomping at the bit — ready to “get their child vaccinated as soon as a vaccine is available” — and another 18% were willing to do so if schools required it.
On the other hand, about half of Kaiser’s parent respondents stated that they either planned to wait or “definitely” would not be getting their child COVID-vaccinated. This is the group of parents that prompted the Ohio researchers in 2011 to scratch their heads and characterize “the need to obtain consent from parents” as a barrier to pediatric medical experimentation.
The “solution” seems to be to bypass troublesome parents altogether. Five states, heedless of the injections’ investigational status, are allowing healthcare providers and medical practices to dispense with parental consent requirements for COVID vaccines.
In North Carolina, adolescents who are 12 and up can provide their own consent if deemed able to understand and make decisions about their health. A representative of the state’s heavyweight health group UNC Health stated, “COVID vaccination is one of those medical treatments that North Carolina says that a child is able to consent for on their own.”
Three other states — Alabama, Oregon and Tennessee — are permitting adolescents 14 or 15 years of age and older to do the same, and Iowa is leaving consent requirements to the discretion of “each individual healthcare provider/health system.”
In March, in the face of heated public opposition, the District of Columbia enacted legislation enabling children as young as 11 to get CDC-recommended vaccines without parental consent or even knowledge.