OVER the last year, groups of doctors around the world have been writing to their regulatory bodies and governments questioning the need and indeed the safety of Covid-19 vaccines for children.
Yet every country continued with pushing out vaccines to teenagers as soon as the adult rollouts were completed, despite specific serious questions remaining unanswered.
The concerns for children are contingent on the extremely low impact of Covid infections on them. This, coupled with increasing awareness of significant adverse events, the total lack of any long-term safety data from these novel technology gene-based ‘vaccines’ and the possibility that a young immune system may not respond in the same way as adults, makes it a matter of the utmost urgency.
A number of safety signals have resulted in certain restrictions, all of which involved higher risks in younger age groups.
For example, some countries discontinued Oxford-AstraZeneca for the under-50s, and others for the under-40s when the link was made to blood clotting disorders. Moderna was dropped for under-30s in Scandinavia following concerns over myocarditis – inflammation of the heart muscle.
Vietnam suspended a whole batch of Pfizer vaccines after 120 schoolchildren were hospitalised. After detecting myocarditis at a risk of 1 in 2680 in boys aged 12 to 17, a 13-fold increase over background rates of the condition, Hong Kong changed its adolescent inoculation programme from two doses to one.
It has taken Norway and Sweden to finally state the obvious, that young children simply do not need these vaccines. Norway and Holland have been first to acknowledge the power of naturally-acquired immunity, saying children with past infection do not require to be vaccinated.
Despite this, and the fact that the tourist industry across Europe is putting pressure on governments to roll back double vaccination requirements for all visitors of all ages, some parents are apparently clamouring to speed the rollout, unhappy that lack of vaccines for younger children is complicating their holiday arrangements.
I would caution any such parent to read the minutes of the Government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) meetings and the warning letters sent to the committee and to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) by senior scientists and doctors, before they take an irrevocable decision about their child’s health. As someone pointed out on Twitter, you can cancel your holiday, but you cannot unvaccinate your child.
They should be aware too that in the UK a recorded increase in non-Covid deaths in males aged 15 to 19 over the last eight months remains a mystery. It has taken a hearing in the High Court in London to get an acknowledgement by the Government that this rise is indeed statistically significant.
In court, the Office of National Statistics produced different figures for the 2015 to 2019 five-year average from those published on its own website. Thus it created uncertainty as to whether the 402 deaths from May to December 2021 constituted 65 or 89 excess deaths.
Worryingly too, the ONS stated in court that the numbers cited for 2021 were likely to be an underestimate because of delayed inclusion in the dataset of those deaths reported to the coroner.
Its statement ended with the chilling admission that ‘the ONS recognises that more work could be undertaken to examine the mortality rates of young people in 2021, and intends to do so once more reliable data are available’.
Similar excess deaths of young males have also been reported from Austria. We are bound to ask, exactly how much more data is needed?
Last week, two independent requests were made to the JCVI asking for an urgent pause to the children’s vaccine rollout, pending a thorough safety investigation.
First, the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Pandemic Recovery, joined by several eminent doctors, wrote to the committee, as was reported in the Daily Sceptic.
Secondly, a large group of health professionals, senior doctors and scientists, now convened as the Children’s Covid Vaccines Advisory Group (CCVAG) sent their fifth letter to the MHRA to date, following up on entirely inadequate responses from its chief executive Dr June Raine to their previous requests – as reported in TCW Defending Freedom and on the Health Advisory and Recovery Team website.
We await their response. But why the hesitation? With a vaccination uptake of more than 90 per cent in the original vulnerable groups of over-50s and those with comorbidities, you would be forgiven for believing that the health authorities would be keen to get back to their day jobs.
And, given such huge upfront and subsequent orders from the Government, surely the big pharmaceutical companies must have recouped their development costs and beyond?
Furthermore, the latest Covid variant Omicron is mild, and it is accepted that the vaccines are unable to prevent infection and transmission of the virus. So what possible justification can there be left for vaccinating children?
Some readers will remember that the Pandemrix swine flu vaccine was withdrawn due to non-fatal neurological side effects, while the hasty rollout of Dengvaxia led to charges against a senior paediatrician after only 19 extra deaths from dengue fever.
The data we have should be more than sufficient to pause the child vaccine rollout pending a full safety investigation including into the 3,252 suspected side-effects reported to date for under-18s on the MHRA Yellow Card reporting system, which marks an increase of 104 events on the previous week’s report.
As a paediatrician, I am at a complete loss to understand the fixation with vaccinating every healthy youngster, especially in the face of such serious safety signals as confirmed in the Government’s own myocarditis advice. What can the reason possibly be?
What, I am left wondering, will it take for this vaccine to be stopped for the world’s children?
