After the TGA provisionally approved the Pfizer vaccine for children 12-15 years of age, Health Minister Greg Hunt stated that the vaccine will likely be available to children from October, with vaccines to be administered in schools and medical centres.
“All the available advice is they are likely to open it up to kids and school-based vaccinations with every state and territory,” Mr Hunt said. “It will be this year, and it’s likely to commence in the last quarter, if not earlier.”
The government continue to ignore the evidence.
An article in the British Medical Journal explains how COVID-19 is mild and serious sequelae are rare in children.
“Despite ‘long covid’ recently garnering increased attention, two large studies in children show that prolonged symptoms are uncommon and overall similar or milder in children testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 compared to those with symptoms from other respiratory viruses.”
“The US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) estimates put the infection fatality rate from COVID-19 among children 0 to 17 years old at 20 per 1,000,000. Hospitalisation rates are also very low, and have likely been overestimated.”
“Furthermore, a large proportion of children have already been infected with SARS-CoV-2. The CDC estimates 42% of US children aged 5 to 17 years have been infected by March 2021.”
“Given that SARS-CoV-2 infection induces a robust immune response in the majority of individuals, the implication is that the risks COVID-19 poses to the paediatric population may be even lower than generally appreciated.”
Professors Robert Booy and Russell Viner support these claims in their article in Insight Plus.
“Children have a very low rate of severe complication or death. It is striking that for each child death from COVID-19 in the US (about 400 in total), more than 1,500 adults have died (>600,000 deaths). The UK has had over 100,000 deaths in adults; there were just 25 child deaths in the year to March 2021, a rate of about two for every million children.”
The numbers simply don’t add up. It has been well documented since the beginning of the pandemic that children are at the lowest risk of severe illness, hospitalisation and death from COVID-19. Why is there even a consideration to vaccinate children?
The British Medical Journal authors continue by explaining the unknown risks of the vaccine.
“A large number of children with very low risk for severe disease would be exposed to vaccine risks, known and unknown. Thus far, Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine has been judged by Israel’s government as likely linked to symptomatic myocarditis, with an estimated incidence between 1 in 3,000 to 1 in 6,000 in men ages 16 to 24.”
“Furthermore, the long-term effects of gene-based vaccines, which involve novel vaccine platforms, remain essentially unknown.”
Adverse events continue to rise in the US in children aged 12-17 years. According to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), there have been 15,741 adverse events, including 947 serious events and, tragically, 18 deaths.
There have been 2,323 reports of anaphylaxis, 406 reports of myocarditis and 77 reports of blood clotting disorders.
These numbers alone should cause the entire vaccine roll out to cease.
Deakin University’s chair of epidemiology Catherine Bennett claims that “now we have delta we can see how many children are impacted and how central schools are to the spread of the virus. If we don’t vaccinate school-aged children, as soon as we have virus in the community it will end up in a school and spread quickly if this remains a largely unvaccinated group.”
However, according to the British Medical Journal, “school teachers are more likely to get SARS-CoV-2 from other adults than they are from their students. The contribution of schools to community transmission has been consistently low across jurisdictions.”
This has been the case in many countries around the world, so why are our premiers and health officials rushing to vaccinate children?
Professors Robert Booy and Russell Viner ask another pertinent question.
“Why are children so resistant? Aren’t vaccine-preventable diseases meant to be the special scourge of children?”
Likely explanations included “better innate immunological resilience, cross-protection from prior exposure to other respiratory coronaviruses and higher adaptive immunity”.
“This resilience of healthy children begs the question of whether they need to be routinely vaccinated against COVID-19.”
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) in the UK says they don’t.
“JCVI does not currently advise routine universal vaccination of children and young people less than 18 years of age”.
“At this time JCVI does not consider that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the potential risks. Until more safety data have accrued and their significance for children and young people has been more thoroughly evaluated, a precautionary approach is preferred.”
A precautionary approach would seem like a sensible and logical idea, two things that have been sorely missing throughout this pandemic.
Another question to ask is could the impact on herd immunity of vaccinating children be of substantial benefit to adults?
Modelling by the Peter Doherty Institute suggests not. According to Professors Booy and Viner, “routine vaccination of well teenagers aged 12–15 years adds little to the reduction in COVID-19 transmission through the community”.
The following question may be the most important question of all.
“Should children be vaccinated with newly developed COVID-19 vaccines when direct (acute COVID-19 and long COVID-19) and indirect (herd immunity) benefits are very limited, and when their long term safety and immunogenicity are still to be determined?”
The simple answer is no.
“Further, how can informed consent be well informed, with the unavoidable uncertainty over longer term (1 year or more) safety?”
It can’t be.
The answers to these questions seem so obvious, yet our government bureaucrats and health officials continue their relentless push to vaccinate children.
Do the benefits outweigh the risks? Clearly they do not.
Children have already suffered at the expense of adults. Lockdowns, school closures, mask wearing, quarantine, isolation, and more. This has had a detrimental impact on their education, socialisation, development and mental health.
Yet, despite the lack of long-term efficacy and safety data, and the minimal risk of severe disease, hospitalisation and death, reports are emerging that Moderna is eyeing off Australia as a potential location for a COVID-19 vaccine trial on children aged 6 months to 12 years. This must be stopped immediately.
With regards to vaccinating children to protect adults, the British Medical Journal sums it up by stating that “this number would likely compare unfavourably to the number of children that would be harmed, including for rare serious events”.
“Should society be considering vaccinating children, subjecting them to any risk, not for the purpose of benefiting them but in order to protect adults? We believe the onus is on adults to protect themselves.”
“There is no need to rush to vaccinate children against COVID-19 – the vast majority stands little to benefit, and it is ethically dubious to pursue a hypothetical protection of adults while exposing children to harms, known and unknown.”
Our children are not lab rats and they are not to be experimented on. We need to do everything we can to protect our children.