Do you want your child to have a yearly COVID shot? That’s where we at ANH think we’re heading.
The federal government is currently considering whether to authorize COVID vaccines for children under five years of age; the shots have already been approved for Americans aged five and up. It appears that the obsession with vaccinating kids against COVID is really about getting COVID shots added to the CDC’s Childhood Immunization Schedule: a yearly COVID shot to help pad the coffers of Big Pharma.
Getting the COVID shots recommended for children is the first step to making them part of the CDC’s recommended childhood schedule—that is, a yearly shot for COVID, potentially long after COVID is no longer a pandemic. If COVID vaccines are added to the childhood immunization schedule, it means billions in sales for vaccine manufacturers and complete liability protection for when children or adults are harmed by the vaccines. Note that liability protection for COVID vaccines will go away when the Health Department determines there is no longer a public health emergency; vaccines on the CDC’s schedule are permanently protected from liability.
Adding COVID vaccines to the CDC’s schedule would require a rulemaking with an opportunity for the public to comment. This process has not started yet, but this is what we see happening if the government recommends the vaccines for children under five. Big Pharma wants guaranteed profits (through adding COVID shots to the CDC’s schedule for kids) and the permanent liability protection that provides. And they will need it. According to the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), there have been 37,684 adverse events from COVID vaccine for kids aged 6-17; we also know that VAERS may miss as many as 99 percent of vaccine reactions. According to the CDC, 40 percent of kids aged 5-11 experienced a “systemic” reaction to COVID vaccines which include, fatigue, headaches, and injection site pain.
Are children at risk from serious COVID outcomes? The data so far suggest that, in large part, they are not. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data show that kids aged 0-4 are the least likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID compared to other age groups. This is confirmed by other studies and data, which tell us that the risk of death and hospitalization from COVID infection is very low in children and strongly associated with comorbidities. We previously reported that, according to government numbers, kids make up very small percentages of COVID deaths and hospitalizations.
To put this in perspective: the average number of children under 18 who died in car crashes from January through September in recent years was six times higher than the number of children who died from COVID-19 from January through September in 2021. More than twice as many children died from heart disease, and about five times as many died from firearms.
CDC data show that children aged 0-4 made up about 1 percent of total hospitalizations for most of the pandemic. From January 2020 to the present, COVID has killed 105 children aged 1-4, which is about 0.01 percent of total COVID deaths. For comparison, pneumonia killed 284 children aged 1-4 during the same time period.
This data has prompted health authorities in Florida to recommend that healthy children not receive the COVID vaccine, contradicting the CDC.
Then there is the recent study data showing the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID vaccine’s effectiveness at preventing cases for kids aged 5-11 dropped precipitously during the omicron variant’s surge, from 68 to 12 percent. The data from the study showed that 12,500 children needed to be vaccinated to prevent a single, non-severe COVID-19 infection. The vaccine was 48 percent effective at preventing hospitalization.
Part of the reason kids may be so resilient is that they have already been infected with COVID and have natural immunity. The UK government has estimated that 85 percent of all children aged 5 to 11 will have had prior SARS-CoV-2 infection by the end of January 2022. Some data suggest that natural immunity offers more durable protection than vaccination.
All of this shows that the case for vaccinating children against COVID is dubious, since it offers little protection to a disease that, overall, does not threaten children nearly as much as other age groups. So why are government regulators pressing forward anyway? The only reasonable explanation, to us, is to move toward getting annual, required COVID shots for young children, which would be a tremendous boon for Big Pharma. It is crony medicine at its finest: special interests using the power and clout of the federal government to guarantee massive vaccine sales, all while being shielded from the responsibility of paying for the damage their products cause. It’s a crony win-win.
