Child Covid Vaccine Mandates Are Coming
Will Anyone Stand in the Way of This Madness?
Last spring as the Covid-19 vaccines were still going through their initial roll out, I wrote that We Don’t Need WARP SPEED for Child Covid Vaccines and layed out my concern that we were jumping the gun in rushing out Covid Vaccines for kids:
For a healthy child with less than a one in a million chance of death from Covid, it takes a long time to root out if a vaccine could have a one in a million deadly side effect. If it does, the risks outweigh the reward for healthy kids.
What concerns me is we appear to have lost our ability to make rational decisions as a society. We're all so eager to get back to normal we'll do whatever it takes.
We already needlessly sacrificed a year of our kid's education, let's not jump the gun on giving them a pharmaceutical product invented last year. Warp Speed made sense for adults, but our kids deserve more time.
This was written at a time with the real world waning efficacy of the vaccines was not yet understood, at a time when the significant dangers of myocarditis side effects in young vaccine recipients had yet to come to light, and at a time when many still believed that universal vaccination against Covid could eradicate the virus. (although many of us already doubted this last point)
Given all these major revelations since, one might expect that our Public Health Betters would have cooled their jets on rapid approval of shots for children. Instead they pushed full steam ahead, first by approving the Pfizer vaccine for 12 to 15 year olds in May based on a trial of just 1,000 teenage vaccine recipients. And now, their sights seem squarely set on approving the vaccine, albeit at a lower dosage, for 5 to 11 year olds in the coming months. The news is all a glow after Pfizer announced preliminary results of their trial on 5 to 11 year olds, saying the vaccine was “safe and effective”, in this case they’re making that declaration having dosed just two thousand children.
You get the sense that the conclusions have already been drawn, the vaccines will be approved for kids, and then shortly after, mandated. Just look at California, which is right now contemplating a vaccine mandate for all school children 12 and up! Is there any doubt this mandate will be extended to all school age kids once the shots are approved for lower age groups?
Lies, Damn lies, and Statistics
This pressure for speedy approval of the vaccines can be sensed by the way the media continues to cover the risks Covid poses to children. If you are a Public Health Better such as Dr. Fauci you can lie with impunity about Covid. During a recent speech Fauci stated the following:
“We are almost overrun. We have a lot of children in hospitals now, so even though relatively speaking, compared to an adult they don’t get as seriously ill, we have lost more children from SARS-CoV-2 than we ever lose from influenza — and we vaccinate children against influenza.”
Now putting aside that it almost sounds like he’s saying there have been more child Covid deaths than child flu deaths since the country’s founding, even on an annualized basis this is still nothing more than an outright lie.
And he’s not the only one who keeps getting away with these lies. Take well respected epidemiologist and former Biden advisor Michael Olsterholm, who in a recent interview stated:
“The fact of the matter is that [Covid] is killing kids right now at a rate much much much higher than our worst severe influenza years”
My God that’s a hyperbolic take! And once again, it’s a complete and utter lie easily refuted by publicly available government data.
I’ve touched on this recently when describing how the “Delta” variant has affected children this summer. The upshot is simple, Covid is putting fewer children in the hospital on an annualized basis than recent flu seasons and substantially fewer than the Swine flu pandemic of 2009, and the same is true for deaths. So it’s not just that Fauci, Olsterholm and so many others like them lie by embellishing the facts, it’s that the facts run in direct opposition to their fear mongering statements.. Covid isn’t “much much much” worse than Flu to kids, it’s not even the same as flu to kids. Children are safer now with Covid on the loose than they were during prior flu seasons even with available flu shots. For more details on this fact, the meticulous Kyle Lamb has a great thread here taking a deep look into the CDC data on pediatric hospitalizations and deaths for Covid vs Flu.
And in both cases the mildness of Covid to children compared to flu remains true even before we factor in the likely over-counting of Covid. This is because every child hospitalized with a positive Covid test is counted as a “Covid Associated Hospitalization” and counted as a Covid death if they die regardless of what may have killed them. This spring the CDC took the time to examine a large sample of covid death certificates from 2020 to better determine the route cause of death. Among children, in 35% of deaths there was no link to Covid whatsoever and in only 4% was Covid the primary factor without significant comorbidities or chain of event conditions!
In their latest Covid disease burden estimate dated through May the CDC, estimated that somewhere between 30 to 45% of all children had already had a Covid 19 infection. Since then we’ve seen a large wave of Covid infections this summer which grew the countries cumulative case count by over 30% since May, meaning it’s likely that by now over half the children in the country have already been infected, and yet the pediatric death count stands at 439 (Through September 15th). Once you subtract over-counted deaths, and factor in the reduced risk for the vast majority of children with no comorbidities, it’s clear that Covid truly possesses something close to a 1 in one million risk of death to healthy kids.
So why must Fauci et al lie about this? It’s a damn miracle that our kids were spared from the horrors of this dread disease, why aren’t we celebrating that fact?
If the government centered their messaging around these facts, if the media stopped pushing fear and highlighted how safe kids are, and if parents around the county had a greater understanding of the actual risk Covid poses to kids, would there be such a push for speedy approval of these vaccines?
The Three Principles of Vaccination
I’ve posited three principles for which we should gauge the validity of any campaign to vaccinated children:
The vaccines should protect against diseases that cause significant mortality and morbidity in children.
The vaccines should prevent children from spreading the disease, and thus help form herd immunity to protect the community at large.
The vaccines given to children should have a proven, LONG TERM track record of safety.
When it comes to the regularly scheduled shots we give to children, all of these principles hold up. Consider for example the MMR vaccine:
In 2018 an estimated 140,000 people died of measles, mostly children under 5 in regions of the world without widespread vaccination.
The MMR vaccine is highly effective, and is a sterilizing vaccine which means not only does it prevent severe symptoms of disease it prevents infection and spread.
The Measles vaccine was first invented in 1963, giving it decades of safety data to draw on. It has mild side effects and severe adverse reactions are incredibly rare.
If we compare these same principles to the case for Covid-19 vaccination in children what do we find?
First, when it comes to morbidity and mortality, as explained above, the risks to children are low. For comparison, based on the estimate that half of all children in the US have been infected we get an IFR for kids of less than 12 in 1 million or 8 in one million after adjusting for the overcount (and maybe 1/10 this amount for healthy kids). Even if all 2.3 billion children in the world were somehow infected with Covid in a single year we’d see only 18,000 Covid deaths, likely 5 times less than the annual child death toll from measles. Simply put, the risks to children, particularly healthy children, posed by Covid is vanishingly small.
Another concern many parents have is the fear that their child will be infected with Covid and develop “Long Covid” symptoms. My critique of the fear mongering over “Long Covid” in adults will have to wait for another post, but when it comes to children there is no need, it does not exist!
Data from the UK really drives this point home. The UK has performed followup symptom check with a large fractions of covid positive individuals as well as matching covid negative controls. Both groups were asked to report if they had any of 12 possible “Long Covid” symptoms such as headache, tiredness, nashea, abdominal pain, etc. Among the children in the study there was no statistical difference between the Covid participants and the controls and in fact there were on average higher rates of symptoms among the control group for kids aged 2 to 11!
The Covid-19 Vaccine for children fails Principle 1. Covid-19 does not pose any significant risk to healthy children, and the risks to children from long covid simply do not exist.
“Stop the Spread”
How about spreading the virus, don’t we have some moral duty to vaccinate our children to “stop the spread”? Putting aside the ethical issues of giving children a treatment they don’t need just to meet some societal goal, it doesn’t appear it would even help. As is now abundantly clear, outside of a short window starting shortly after one’s second shot, the Covid-19 vaccines DO NOT prevent spread. Based on the data from Israel and the UK the effectiveness in preventing infection and spread drops to close to zero after 6 months. These vaccines are NON-sterilizing, so they will not play a significant role in reaching herd immunity.
A study out of Qatar exemplifies this point. It measured the effectiveness of the vaccines over time. The study found vaccine efficacy against infection peaked at 72% in the first 5 weeks after the 2nd dose. It then began to decline gradually over the next 10 weeks before dropping precipitously beyond 20 weeks from the second dose. Based on this study, and many others like it, the vaccines would appear to offer no long term protection against infection.
It should be noted that the study found good long term efficacy against severe disease and death throughout the study period. The vaccine continues to perform remarkably well at preventing the worst outcomes, which matters greatly for the elderly and infirm who need this protection against this disease.
However, this effect doesn’t matter for healthy kids who are at no risk of these outcomes to begin with. If the vaccines can’t stop one from becoming infected and spreading the disease over the long term, they can’t be counted on to help our society reach herd immunity. It’s a tough realization for many to come to, but it would appear the only way societal wide immunity will be created is through natural infection. Again, for healthy kids this isn’t a problem at all.
Furthermore, the worry of kids as “super-spreaders” has been overblown throughout this entire pandemic. The fear has been that schools would become viral incubators starting outbreaks that would affect surrounding communities. In reality schools are remarkably safe, and not because of masks.
It appears that in general children spread this disease less than adults. Most infections in schools are from teacher to student, not student to teacher. A Spanish study found a defined age gradient in transmission within school bubble groups. Based on the study it would appear that the younger a child is, the less they tend to spread SARS-CoV-2. The mechanisms for this are unclear, and it may simply be that the ACE2 receptor, which SAR-Cov-2 uses to get into your cells, tends to be less active in children.
The Covid-19 Vaccine for children fails principle 2. Since children already spread the disease less than adults, and since inoculation does not appear to change this transmission dynamic in the long term, there is no justification for vaccinating children based on the need to “Stop the Spread”
But is it Safe?
The Covid-19 vaccine is brand new. Based on the initial trials in adults it did not appear to have any life threatening side effects. That being said the trials did show the vaccines to have much harsher rates of side effects than other vaccines, which may have been a clue that the risk of severe adverse reactions was present. For older and at risk adults this was enough information to move forward. The small chance of an adverse reaction pales in comparison to the substantial life threatening risk of a Covid-19 infection. But again, the risk-benefit math is completely different for children so much more caution is warranted.
By themselves, the side effect results in the Pfizer trial on 12- 15 year olds (table 3d) was not great. Fully 10% of vaccine recipients had a grade 3 or grade 4 reaction, with grade 3 defined as “prevents daily routine activity or requires use of a pain reliever.” and grade 4 defined as “requires emergency room visit or hospitalization”. Should healthy teenagers really have to risk a 1 in 10 chance of being knocked out for at least a day just to temporarily prevent risk of infection against a disease posing almost no risk to them?
When the FDA approved vaccines for 12 to 15 year olds, they made this decision based on a trial including just 1,000 vaccine recipients, meaning they were essentially blinds to risks greater than 1 in 1,000. This while the risk to healthy kids may be 1,000 times less than that.
Upon the roll out of the vaccines to younger Americans significant safety signals were discovered. First the risk of rare blood clots in the J&J vaccine and then the even greater risk of myocarditis in the mRNA vaccines. It’s important to note, these risks of serious side effects were not discovered in any of the phase 3 trials, but only during widespread roll out of the vaccines to the general public.
The risks of myocarditis and similar heart issues, particularly in boys and young men is substantial. A recent study used VAERS data to search for Vaccination-Associated Myocarditis in Children Ages 12-17. The results are shocking! The study finds the risk of hospitalization from this single post-vaccination heart ailment to far upstrip the risk of hospitalization for Covid among healthy teens, regardless of SAR-CoV-2 prevalence in the community. It should be noted that VAERS is a voluntary database, meaning these reports are likely an undercount of the actual effect. Further, there is no accounting of the risk of other minor heart ailments which don’t lead to hospitalization, but which may still lead to long term injury.
The risks amount to about 1 to 2 in every 10,000 vaccinated teens, which is small. But the risks of Covid for these healthy teens is so much smaller. One would have expected the discovery of this side effect to shut down teen vaccinations. Instead states are contemplating a mandate.
The risks of myocarditis were significant enough that the FDA has required Pfizer to conduct a more thorough safety study (page 6) to evaluate the occurrence of myocarditis post vaccination. The study isn’t due to be complete until 2025, so shouldn’t we pause the role out of the vaccine for healthy teens until this study concludes?
And would we expect the results in 5 to 11 year olds to be any different? The Pfizer press release boasts that the side effects in children were similar to those seen in the older age groups and “well tolerated”. I’m sorry, but that is damning with faint praise. The side effects in teens are terrible, and if the same is true for younger children that alone should ban their use.
Beyond short term adverse reactions, we also have no data on long term side effects from the vaccines, and how could we?, the first human subjects got their shots not much more than one year ago. Unlike the phantom risk of “Long Covid” this is a long term risk worth considering. These vaccines use new technology and we can’t rule out that they may have long term adverse effects. Since children are not at risk, why would we not take the time to better determine whether long term vaccine risks exist?
The Covid-19 vaccine for children fails principle 3. The vaccines have harsh side effects which alone might rule out their use for some, and the risk of severe and even life threatening reactions is present.
We Mandate Anyway
So on all three counts, the Covid-19 vaccines fail the test, and this, I believe, is why our Public Health Betters feel they have to lie. They cannot justify child vaccination on the merits, yet they seem hellbent to vaccinate every last soul in a vain and futile attempt to “End the Pandemic”. Without the facts on their side they lie and present a fearful narrative which our media amplifies.
CNN’s favorite vaccine authoritarian Dr. Leana Wen gives us a perfect example of how this works. If she had it her way, adults who refused the vaccine would be locked in their homes until they were forcefully inoculated. And she is coming for our kids next.
In this clip you witness the entire false narrative on display. Dr. Wen insists masks will still be needed even in fully vaccinated classrooms unless ubiquitous testing is present. This is the same narrative pushed by many other TV talking heads, but it’s just not true! Schools across the county and across Europe have ditched masks without seeing case spikes and without routine testing.
The goal of this narrative is now obvious. They will use the threat of masks, testing, and the forced quarantining of your healthy child to convince you to get them vaccinated. Instead of laying out the facts so that parents can make the best risk benefit decision for their own children, they will hold your child hostage until you acquiesce to their goals. This choice should be left to the parent without coercion. Kids do not need to be vaccinated in order to resume normal life.
One can image a more sane world where these vaccines could be conditionally approved for at risk children. Where each parent in consultation with their doctor could come to the most appropriate decision for their children. In that world there would be a large middle ground between not approved so you can’t take it, and approved and then immediately mandated, where parents had a choice.
Unfortunately, it does not appear to me that parents in many states will have this choice. Just as we’ve seen this week with the CDC Director’s decision to expand vaccine boosters in direct contradiction to the FDA advisory panel’s decision, is there any doubt the same actions will be made on vaccines for young children? And once it is approved, is there any doubt they will become mandated in states like California?
What do our scientific institutions now stand for? Will anyone stand in the way to stop this? How many children will be needlessly harmed?
I continue to hope that truth will prevail and this madness will end. But at this point we all might need to start figuring out a backup plan.
Anyway 0 and 2…