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
By 
Who Controls the Administrative State?
President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.
It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.
The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.
How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.
All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.
The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.
Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.
This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.
The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.
The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.
The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.
A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.
There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.
Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.
Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.
After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?
So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.
What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.
We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.
All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.
What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.
For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.
That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.
That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.
There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.
First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.
That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.
Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.
In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.
Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?
Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.
Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.
If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.
The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?
Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.
Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
By
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterizations of things I have said that are simply not true. When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Within hours, my news feed was populated with angsty articles hand-wringing about the future of vaccines under Kennedy, whom legacy media and the establishment are certain would confiscate life-saving vaccine programs, raising the spectre of mass waves of illness and death.
In particular, this quote from Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the only Republican who voted against Kennedy’s confirmation, appeared over and over again:
“I’m a survivor of childhood polio. In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.”
Yet, I could not find one piece of mainstream coverage of this quote that mentioned the astonishing fact that 98% of polio cases in 2023, the most recent year for which we have full data, were caused by the polio vaccine.
You read that correctly. In 2023, 12 wild polio cases were recorded (six in Afghanistan, six in Pakistan), with a further 524 circulating vaccine-derived cases, mostly throughout Africa. This trend is in keeping with data from the previous several years.
An important contextualising detail, wouldn’t you think?
The cause of this polio resurgence is that the world’s poor are given the oral polio vaccine (OPV), which contains a weakened virus that can replicate in the gut and spread in feces, causing vaccine-derived outbreaks.
People in rich countries get the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), which does not contain live virus and therefore does not carry the risk of spreading the very disease it’s vaccinating against.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and vaccine-promoting organisations say that the way out of the problem is to vaccinate harder, as the argument goes that outbreaks only occur in under-vaccinated communities.
This may be well and good, but the total omission of the fact from media coverage that the goalposts have shifted from eradicating wild polio (not yet complete but nearly there, according to the WHO) to eradicating vaccine-derived polio (the main problem these days) underscores that this is why hardly anyone who knows anything trusts the media anymore.
A member of my extended family has polio. It’s nasty and life-altering and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
That’s why I would hope that any vaccines given would be safe – contracting polio from the supposedly preventative vaccine is the worst-case scenario, second only to death.
This is Kennedy’s expressly stated aim.
“When people actually hear what I think about vaccines, which is common sense, which is vaccines should be tested, they should be safe, everyone should have informed consent,” he said at his confirmation press conference.
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterisations of things I have said that are simply not true.
“When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Grown-ups who support vaccines can walk and chew gum. From the point of view of the public health establishment, the polio vaccine has prevented millions of cases and has nearly eradicated the disease.
At the same time, the world’s poorest are afflicted with polio outbreaks which we can work to prevent, and the safety of all polio vaccine products on the market should be subject to the rigorous standards applied to all other medicines.
Unless you think that poor people don’t matter, in which case the status quo might suit you fine.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
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