Brownstone Institute
Stop Vaccinating Children: It’s Neither Medically Justified Nor Ethical
As time passes, Covid policy is proving to be a bigger threat than Covid disease. Promoted as an initial protection measure to buy much-needed time against a once-in-a-century pandemic, it became a way of life to which health bureaucrats and autocratically-inclined leaders became addicted and are having trouble letting go.
Yet in the UK: “The effects of lockdown may now be killing more people than are dying of Covid.” An editorial in the Telegraph emphasized the importance of establishing why a meaningful cost-benefit analysis of Covid policy was not carried out. Former UK Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption describes lockdown as “an experiment in authoritarian government unmatched in our history even in wartime.” Australia’s vaunted success in controlling the pandemic in 2020–21, meanwhile, looks increasingly hollow in 2022 (Figure 1).
The instinct to protect offspring is one of the most powerful in nature across all species, with examples only too common of parents, especially mothers, sacrificing themselves in a desperate effort to save their young. On September 4, on the edge of the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve in central India, Archana Choudhary was working in the fields with her 15-month toddler when a tiger appeared and sunk its teeth into the baby’s head. Choudhary grappled the tiger with her bare handstrying to free the baby from its jaws until, hearing her screams, villagers came to her assistance with sticks and stones and the tiger fled. Both Mum and Bub were taken to hospital, with the mother’s wounds being the more serious. A real-life Tiger Mom!
The hardwired instinct to protect children might explain why in jurisdictions where vaccines have been approved for children, the takeup, especially for young children, has lagged well behind the adult vaccination rates. The effort to psychologically nudge and politically coerce children’s vaccination is abhorrent, distressing and puzzling in equal measures.
Children Are at Very Low Risk
Abhorrent, because it’s an acute manifestation of the evil that has taken hold following the fear induced in peoples by deliberate psychological campaigns of terror propaganda, aided and abetted by mainstream and social media. Large numbers of people in Western societies have actively colluded with governments in imposing harms on children. Debbie Lerman wrote an excellent account on this site of how instilling and sustaining mass fear was the one unifying theme that explains all the otherwise crazy edicts and policy interventions by the US government.
In almost all Western countries, the average age of Covid deaths has been higher than the average life expectancy and the mortality risk to children is lower by a thousandfold. This is the first occasion in history where children have been made to bear the heaviest costs, with futures mortgaged to massive debts, educational opportunities drastically curtailed and exposure to potentially harmful and even lethal medical interventions, just so the old can cling on to life for a few more months and years. Take two telling examples.
In January UNICEF reported on the devastating setbacks to children’s education. Robert Jenkins, UNICEF Chief of Education, said “we are looking at a nearly insurmountable scale of loss to children’s schooling.” Large-scale independent studies published in early September documented a two-decade reversal in children’s educational progress in the US. Japan experienced a jump in suicides by more than 8,000 between March 2020 and June 2022 compared to pre-pandemic numbers, mostly among women in their teens and 20s.
Unlike the flu, which tends not to discriminate between different age cohorts, coronavirus is very age-specific. The exceptional and extreme age-segregation of Covid deaths was known very early in the pandemic. On April 30, 2020, the Daily Mail reported that children under 10 are not transmitters of the disease. Despite more than 26,000 Covid-related deaths in the UK, experts who reviewed the data failed to find a single case of an infected under-10 who had passed on the disease to an adult.
The BBC reported on May 7, 2020 that in England and Wales, there were only around 300 deaths in under-45s compared to around 24,000 in over-65s. Older people with pre-existing health conditions were the most at risk, as shown in a visually striking age-adjusted graph from the BBC (Figure 2). For those under 20, the risk is negligible. In October 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration – with 932,500 signatories currently, including 63,100 doctors and medical and public health scientists – noted that the mortality risk of Covid in the young was a thousand-fold less than in the old and infirm.
On June 30, 2021, Prof. Robert Dingwall, a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation that advises the UK government, said letting children catch Covid would be better than vaccinating them. Their intrinsically low risk from Covid means they may be “better protected by natural immunity generated through infection than by asking them to take the ‘possible’ risk of a vaccine.”
In July, Stanford University’s Cathrine Axfors and John Ioannidis published their estimate that survivability of infected under-20s is 99.999%, falling to 99.958% for the under-50s..
The persistence of the drive to vaccinate children is puzzling because the lockdown and vaccine narratives are falling apart. One driver of this is the growing realization that excess death counts from all-cause mortality have risen in many countries, including Australia, Netherlands and the UK.
Death is the one statistic that cannot be fudged or subjected to definitional spin. In their analysis of the 50 US states, John Johnson and Denis Raincourt show that if anything, lockdown states have higher all-cause mortality rates than contiguous non-lockdown states. In many cases deaths also seem to track vaccination campaigns in successive doses.
In part the situation reflects the monomaniacal obsession with Covid to the exclusion of other leading killer diseases. The Telegraph pointed out that the UK National Health Service is once again on the verge of collapse, this time from “a tsunami of non-Covid patients who were denied treatment during the pandemic.”
Lockdown Back Pedalling
As noted by Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson of Oxford University, prominent practitioners of evidence-based medicine rather than modelling-based projections, the “lockdown back-pedalling race” has begun. In late August, former UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak said it had been a mistake to empower the government’s scientific advisory committee SAGE, whose analyses and forecasts were dominated by gloom and doom unless stringent restrictions were put in place yesterday.
He added that insufficient attention had been paid to the knock-on effects of lockdowns on health, education and the economy. The fear messaging had also been wrong and harmful in destroying trust in public institutions. Critics attributed his Damascene conversion to a desperate effort to revive his faltering campaign for leadership of the Conservative Party and hence becoming prime minister of the UK.
I believe this is wrong. By then the writing was clearly on the wall and Sunak, by all accounts a fundamentally decent man, wanted to go on the public record, inwardly accepting that he had already lost, in order to put obstacles in the path of future lockdowns. In that sense Sunak’s Spectator interview is more accurately read as the start of the unravelling of the great Covid narrative. Sure enough, he was soon followed by former cabinet colleagues and parliamentarians.
Former Transport Secretary Grant Shapps revealed he brought along his own spreadsheets on international data to cabinet discussions to counter SAGE analysis and advice. Even Sunak’s leadership rival, and now PM, Liz Truss claims she too was opposed to lockdowns. Unfortunately, this is contradicted by her public record but no matter, she has boxed herself in as regards returning to lockdown in the future.
Meanwhile, Denmark has banned vaccines for under-18s and under-50s can get a booster only with a doctor’s prescription. The CDC’s new guidance acknowledges the “transient” protection from vaccination against infection and transmission and the reality of naturally-acquired immunity through infection.
It therefore recommended against any further discrimination by vaccination status for most settings. Yet, again demonstrating bureaucrats’ infinite capacity for idiocy, the ban on unvaccinated visitors to the US was maintained and stopped Novak Djokovic from competing in athe US Open that was denuded of serious star power in the men’s semis and finals.
Vaccines for Australian Children
In Israel, as succinctly summarized by Will Jones, public health authorities and the government deliberately covered up serious vaccine side-effects. In September we learnt that several Australian health officials were on a government- sponsored visit as guests of Israel’s Ministry of Health.
On July 19, Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) granted provisional approval to Moderna for administering Spikevax vaccines to children aged 0.5–5 years. Provisional because they are still undergoing clinical trials to assess full safety. The decision is especially strange in light of concerning reports of deaths, adverse events and long-term side-effects accompanying vaccines. The Therapeutic Goods Regulation (1990) restricts provisional approvals to medicines for “the treatment, prevention or diagnosis of a life-threatening or seriously debilitating condition.”
This would appear to rule out provisional vaccine approval for children below five, as shown in the empirical data from New South Wales (NSW). The resilience of the under-50s can be seen in Figure 3. In the 14-week period May 22–August 27, they made up 27.3% of Covid-related hospitalization and 19.7% of ICU admissions, but only 1.4% of deaths. In the same period, just 0.11% of all Covid-related deaths in NSW were children and young people up to the age of 19 (Figure 4).
On this basis, a group of lawyers is aiming to file a crowd-funded case in the High Court (Australia’s equivalent of the US Supreme Court) against the decision. But so far Australian courts have been disappointingly supine toward health edicts.
The TGA’s website states that its “regulatory costs are mostly recovered through annual fees and charges levied on the sponsors and manufacturers of therapeutic goods.” An article in the British Medical Journal by Maryannne Demasi, published on June 29, documented that a compromising 96% of the TGA’s A $170mn 2020–21 budget came from industry sources, higher than the rates (in descending order) for the European, UK, Japanese, US and Canadian counterparts.
This is beyond regulatory capture and closer to the regulator being in the pocket of the regulated. Should we be surprised that the TGA approved nine of every ten applications from drug companies that year? The TGA “firmly denies that its almost exclusive reliance on pharmaceutical industry funding is a conflict of interest,” and the TGA is an honourable regulator. Yet the sad reality is the global drug industry has a particularly scandal-ridden record in influencing regulatory decisions via funding with regard, for example, to opioids, Alzheimer’s drugs, influenza antivirals, pelvic mesh, joint prostheses, breast and contraceptive implants, cardiac stents, etc.
In the Declaration for the Protection of Children and Young People from the Covid-19 Response in May 2021, the Pandemics Data and Analytics (PANDA) group said that Covid-19 is “a disease for which they [the young] carry essentially no risk.” Therefore vaccinating children is “all risk, no benefit.” Are we really going to engage in child sacrifice on the altar of Big Pharma?
Directing attention and resources without age-stratified discrimination – because “everyone is equally at risk” – made no medical or policy sense, unless, as Lerman postulates, the primary goal was to inculcate a self-sustaining state of mass panic. So even the children had to be routinely tested, isolated, deschooled, masked and vaccinated as part of what Swedish Dr. Sebastian Rushworth called the “Covid mania” and “collective state of hysteria.”. Universal vaccines is like the drunk looking for car keys near the light from the street lamp instead of where he lost them.
Against the extremely low serious risk from Covid with a survival rate of 99.99% for 0-19 year olds, the likely greater risk from vaccines, and the completely unknown long-term effects of the new-technology vaccines, if I had young children, I’d resist attempts to jab them, to the death if necessary.
Ordinarily, it would be best to put the whole Covid nightmare behind us and move on. This might be one of the rare exceptions, for accountability for the pain and harms inflicted on individuals and society is the best, and likely the only effective insurance against a repeat.
On July 23 the World Health Organization declared monkeypox, which so far has affected few people in a handful of countries, a public health emergency of international concern.
David Bell and Emma McArthur warn that the global pandemic industry has no plans for a return to normal. This is why the chief architects of population-wide lockdown and vaccine policies must be identified, put in the dock and made to answer and pay for their misdeeds.
Lest we forget.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages.
People are out and about, smiling at each other. It’s been true since the morning after the election, the results of which defied every prediction. Who doesn’t like to see the smug elites who have ruled the world for five awful years taken down a peg?
More than that, there are hints of a return to sanity. Mainstream advertisers are suddenly returning to X, putting their economic interest above their tribalist loyalties. The editor of pro-lockdowns Scientific American, which had long blessed totalitarian measures as true science, has resigned.
The attempt to pillage InfoWars and give it to The Onion has been reversed by a federal judge. That might be a fluke or might not be: maybe the lawfare is dialing back too. The cabinet of the incoming administration is being filled by voices that were fully censored for years. Employees are reportedly packing their bags at the FDA and other agencies.
Mainstream news commentators are sputtering around with less bravado than they have shown in years. CNN is firing major personalities.
Trump is talking about abolishing the income tax and granting $10K in tax credits per homeschooled child, not to mention blowing up college accreditation systems, among other sweeping changes.
The American Bastille day is coming, not only freeing the political prisoners of January 6 but also many of the unjustly persecuted including Ross Ulbricht, Roger Ver, and Ian Freeman, among so many others. That will be a day of rejoicing.
Oh, and peace seems to have broken out in some contentious areas of the world, for now.
What is happening? This is not the usual transfer of the resident of the White House. This is starting to look like an actual transfer of power, not just from Biden to Trump but from the permanent government – ensconced in many sectors – that has been long in hiding to an entirely new form of government responsive to actual voters.
As it turns out, there was no late surge for Kamala Harris. All the polls were wrong, and the rest was media blather. What was correct were the betting odds on Polymarket, and only days later, the FBI raided the 26-year-old founder’s home and confiscated his phone and laptop.
There are still many millions of missing voters, people who supposedly showed up for Biden in 2020 but stayed home this time. Meanwhile, there has been a historic shift in all races, ethnicities, and regions, with even the possibility of flipping California from blue to red in the future.
After decades of academic slicing and dicing of the population according to ever more eccentric identity buckets involving race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual interest, along with countless thousands of studies documenting deep complexity over intersectionality, the driving force of the election was simple: class, and the few intellectuals and some wealthy entrepreneurs who understand that.
The division was not really left vs right. It was workers vs laptoppers, wage earners vs six-figure stay-at-homers, bottom half vs top 5 percent, people with actual skills vs weaponized resume wielders, and those with affection for old-world values vs those whose educations have beaten it out of them for purposes of career advancement.
The silent majority has never been so suddenly loud. It just so happened that the heavily privileged had come to inhabit easily identifiable sectors of American society and, in the end, had no choice but hitch the whole of the overclass wagon to the fortunes of a candidate like themselves (Kamala) but who was unable to pull off a compelling masquerade. Not even a parade of well-paid celebrity endorsements could save her from total rebuke at the polls.
Sylvester Stallone called Trump a second George Washington but another reference point might be Andrew Jackson. The overwhelming victory for Trump is on a scale not seen since 1828 when, four years after the presidency was stolen from Jackson, Old Hickory came back in a wild landslide and cleaned up Washington. Trump arrives in Washington with a mandate for the same, with 81% of the public demanding that the government shrink in size and power.
It has all happened so quickly. We are barely ten days into the realization of what just transpired and the entire lay of the land seems different, like a tectonic shift in politics, culture, mood, and possibilities. We are even seeing blunt and open talk about the horrendous Covid response that so utterly demoralized the country and the world, after years of silence on the topic. We have promised hearings coming, and court cases galore now on fast track.
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages. It provides the beginnings of an answer to the great question on our minds for decades: how precisely does an authentic revolution take root in an industrialized Western democracy? Are elections capable of delivering real results?
For now, the answer seems to be yes. That should thrill any responsible observer of social, cultural, economic, and political affairs. It means that the early architects of the American system were not wrong. The intolerable costs of political upheaval of ages past can be mitigated by planting power firmly in the hands of the people through the plebiscite. This was their view and their gamble. All the evidence of our time points to the wisdom of the idea.
In the darkest days of the last year of the first Trump presidency, the bureaucracy was riding high, in full revenge mode against an elected government it hated and sought to overthrow. The agencies were passing strange edicts that felt like laws but no one knew for sure. You are essential, you are not. You must stay home, unless you have an emergency. Your elective surgery needs to wait. The kids cannot go to school. That European vacation cannot happen. You can eat at a restaurant but only if you are six feet away from other patrons and you must put this China-made cloth on your mouth if you get up to go to the restroom.
The flurry of edicts was mind-boggling. It felt like martial law, because it was some form of exactly that. The best research points to the astonishing reality that this was never really a public-health response but a scheme by security and intelligence sectors to enact some kind of global color revolution, which is why the policies were so similar the world over. It was indeed an awesome display of power, one that invaded all our communities, homes, and families.
No one knows this better than Team Trump, even if there has been near silence on the topic for all these years. They have had time to put the pieces together and figure out what happened and why. And they carefully, and in seclusion worthy of a Cistercian monastery, plotted their return, leaving nothing to chance.
Meanwhile, the past two years have had the Covid insurrectionists quietly stepping away from the spotlight, while leaving as much of their newfound power in place: the censorship, the technology, the mandates, and the propaganda that all of this shock-and-awe was nothing more than “common sense health measures.” It was never tenable, and vast numbers have come to realize that something went very wrong, like a kind of evil settled over the world and burrowed itself within all institutions.
In an instant, the whole scheme seems to be crumbling. The incredible result is that the administration under which this calamity occurred is now coming back, which is probably the strangest irony of our times.
And yet, even though no one has yet been open about precisely what happened in the White House in March 2020 to cause Trump to greenlight the lockdowns, there is a widespread belief that it was never really his choice. It was some kind of coup – egged on even by his closest advisors and the VP – that he either could not stop or lacked the personnel to marshal effective resistance. Regardless, he has been forgiven because, implausibly, the next administration not only owned the worst of it but added even more on top of that, including the wicked combination of mask mandates, forced injections, and continued school closures.
The result has been a continuing economic crisis, one far worse than agencies admit, in addition to a health, education, and cultural crisis. Meanwhile, all those involved in causing this from behind the scenes have been rewarded with professorships, loving interviews in the mainstream media, and lavish security provisions to protect them from legions of what they suppose are angry workers and peasants.
Therefore, among many of the ruling class, the results of this election are certainly not welcome, and nor are many of the early appointments. They represent the coming together of MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE, the fulfillment of decades of cultivation of disparate groups of dissidents who had not previously realized their common interests and common enemies. It was the Covid era and the imposition of top-down rule that brought them all together.
It was like three groups wandering around in a giant maze who suddenly confront each other and then, realizing that they all shared the same predicament, figure the way out together. These new alliances have not only shattered right and left, as traditionally understood, but reshaped the structural basis of political activism for the duration. It turns out that medical freedom, food freedom, free speech, political freedom, and peace all go together. Who knew?
The incumbent world of academia, think tanks, and most media simply finds itself unprepared to deal with the new realities. They had hoped everyone would forget about the last five years as if it was just a thing that happened but is now over; everyone just needs to grapple with the great reset and learn to love our new lives of surveillance, propaganda, censorship, perpetual war, poison food, unaffordable everything, and endless injections of potions for our own health and well-being.
Well, times have changed. How much? Early signs point to a dramatic unfolding of revolutionary change over the coming months. Is believing this the triumph of hope over experience? Absolutely. Then again, no one believed five years ago that most people in the world would be locked in their homes and communities, stuck drinking and streaming movies until biotech could come up with a cure for a respiratory virus with a zoonotic reservoir. Then it did not work and made people more sick than ever.
That was nuts but it happened.
If that could happen, with predictable results, the response could be equally implausible and more much thrilling. What’s man made can be unmade by man, and something new built in its place.
Author
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