AT the beginning of this year, as the Omicron variant spread, the mainstream media ran the intriguing story of a ‘desperate’ mother travelling to Italy to have her nine-year-old daughter inoculated with the Covid vaccine.
This was because the jab was available for young children there, but could be given to under-12s in Britain only if they were classed as clinically vulnerable.
So, as told in this January 5 BBC report, Alice Colombo drove to Milan from Maidstone, Kent, where her daughter, who has Italian citizenship, could be vaccinated.
She said she undertook the arduous journey to protect ‘the most precious thing in the world’, adding: ‘I’d rather risk a vaccine we know a fair amount about than take pot luck with a virus about which we know very little.’
Ms Colombo said they made the 13-hour, 750-mile trip by road to minimise the risk of mixing with others in planes and airports. ‘I feel incredibly, incredibly sorry for all those other parents who share my opinion and would like to get their children vaccinated,’ she added.
The story was picked up by other media, including The Times and the Daily Mail. Ms Colombo was also interviewed by Kate Garraway and Ben Shepherd on Good Morning Britain before the Italian media also featured her tale.
What parent could fail to be moved by the harrowing account of a mother willing to take these extraordinary measures to ensure the safety of her child from the perceived threat of an unknown new Covid variant?
For reasons best known to themselves, the MSM didn’t give any further information about Ms Colombo. But had they done so, we may have learned that, as well as being a concerned parent, she also happens to be highly-placed professional in the health sector – as director of the Kent-based Health and Europe Centre (HEC). But there, she uses her maiden name of Alice Chapman-Hatchett.
She is also president of the European Public Health Alliance (EPHA), of which the HEC is part, and which receives money from billionaire philanthropist and Bill Gates’s good friend George Soros. The EPHA says it is ‘Europe’s leading NGO alliance, advocating better health for all.’ It also wants ‘fair and equitable allocation of safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines’.
So what of her comments to the BBC? Ms Colombo said we know a fair amount about the vaccine, but little about the virus.
However, the virus has been around since December 2019, a year longer than the vaccine, so we know more about it than we do about the vaccine. And we know that only a tiny number of children suffer serious enough Covid symptoms to be hospitalised.
Consultant pathologist Dr Clare Craig has done some basic maths about the perceived threat to the young. She said: ‘If 0.0013 per cent children die with Covid when infected, then out of 76,923 infected, there will be one death. If you need to vaccinate 200 kids to prevent one infection, then you need to vaccinate 200 x 76,923 = 15,384,615 to prevent one Covid death.
‘Omicron is one-third as lethal in children as the Delta variant, so 46,153,846 need to be vaccinated to prevent one Covid death. Therefore, if more than one child in 46million dies from vaccination, then you have net negative mortality.’
The Joint Committee for Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), the scientists who recommend to the Government which age groups should be vaccinated, said: ‘Of those (children) admitted to hospital over the last few weeks comprising the Omicron wave, the average length of hospital stay was one to two days. A proportion of these admissions are for precautionary reasons.’
However, it seems collective pressure has swayed the JCVI, which now says that five to 11-year-olds can be vaccinated despite 85 per cent having been already infected by the end of January.
The Belgian vaccine developer and Covid vaccine critic Geert Vanden Bossche has said that vaccinating during the pandemic would mean children would become more vulnerable to infection as the virus mutated to keep itself alive. Covid is essentially a virus that is dangerous to the elderly and not really bothered with the young, but constant variants, as the virus tries to beat the vaccine, has meant more risk to children.
Meanwhile, Ms Chapman-Hatchett has been pushing vaccination via her Twitter feed and has participated with Deborah Cohen, the former BBC health correspondent and ITV science editor, in webinars on how to boost vaccine uptake.
About 24 minutes into this recorded video, Ms Chapman-Hatchett says: ‘We know from many years across public health work in all aspects that peer workers work if you’ve got somebody that you can relate to as a human being who understands your context.
‘You’re far more inclined to trust them than some outsider; maybe even an outsider in a white coat or an outsider who looks as though they are coming from the state. It’s far easier to use peer workers.’
Like a desperate mother perhaps?
What we know now is that the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the government body responsible for the surveillance of new medical products, has received 3,252 reports of under 18 adverse events that parents or doctors felt were serious enough to report to the Yellow Card Scheme. That is from a total of 3.1million under-18s injected.
TCW Defending Freedom asked Ms Chapman-Hatchett why she used her married name in speaking to the BBC about the Italian trip, but she did not respond.
