Biotechnology company Moderna Therapeutics has launched a large-scale testing of its COVID jab on infants as young as six months old. The vaccine clinical trial, called KidCOVE, is being carried out at 81 locations across 30 states on some 13,275 healthy children between six months and 12 years old.
The first participants were enrolled in the trial in March 2021 (the same time when Moderna’s competitor Pfizer started the same trials in the same cohort). The study is estimated to be completed in June 2023.
The primary purpose of the study, according to Moderna, is to test the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine mRNA-1273 in protecting children from getting sick if they come into contact with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19.
The company plans to conduct the study in two parts, staggering the recruitment of three different age groups: (1) children between the ages of six years to less than 12 years old; (2) children between the ages of two years to less than six years old; (3) children ages six months to less than two years old.
Moderna explains that participation in the KidCOVE Study “lasts approximately 14 months and includes phone calls, telemedicine visits, and up to seven visits to the study site.”
Initially, every young participant will be given “up to 3 dose levels” of the study vaccine or the placebo in the upper arm, about 28 days apart.
Parents or guardians will be asked to use an eDiary app on their smartphones to report any COVID symptoms a child experiences. It is also noted that every child will be closely monitored if any symptoms of COVID are reported at any time throughout their participation.
Moderna specifically underlines an importance of diversity of the study, stressing that recruitment of “children of all ages, genders, races and ethnicities” is critical for “creating a vaccine that will protect people of all ages and from all backgrounds against this devastating disease.”
Moderna is looking for generally healthy children for its trials, but those with chronic diseases such as asthma, diabetes cystic fibrosis, and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection are also welcome if their conditions are stable. Young girls must not be pregnant or breastfeeding and use proper contraception/ abstinence through the trial.
Excluded from eligibility are children with a “known history” of COVID infection or “close contact” with an infected person within two weeks of the trial, as well as those who have participated in the COVID vaccine trials previously, have an allergy to one of the shot’s components, or have received monoclonal antibodies in the past six months.
Just the News reported that the media attention to the vaccine trials in infants has gained traction this week, when the University of Wisconsin medical school announced that “dozens” of children under age six were participating in its trial at American Family Children’s Hospital.
Bill Hartman, co-principal investigator of the KidCOVE clinical trial at UW–Madison, described the study on infants and toddlers as the “final frontier.” He said, “Our very youngest children need to get the vaccine and we need to make sure they are safe.” Hartman called the subjects of the trials “heroes” who “will be able to tell the story of how they helped save the world.”
Hartman provided in the e-mail to the outlet that “many kids” have contracted COVID during the Delta variant spreading throughout the country this past summer, which landed 30,000 kids in hospitals.
He added that infected children had either missed daycare or school, or “they [children] went on to infect the people around them, including immunocompromised relatives.”
Hartman also pointed to the nearly 600 child deaths attributed to COVID, comparing them to 188 flu deaths in the same population that occurred in the season preceding the pandemic.
Finally, the doctor mentioned infants younger than one possibly being at higher risk of severe illness with COVID than older children, “likely due to their immature immune systems and smaller airways, which make them more likely to develop breathing issues with respiratory virus infections.”
According to Just the News, Doctor Hartman “didn’t respond to a subsequent query about the documented difficulty of young children transmitting COVID; why he compared multiple seasons of COVID to one flu season; or a request for the underlying health of children who died from the flu versus COVID.”
The outlet asked Harvard Medical School epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, a pioneer in vaccine safety, to comment on Hartman’s arguments.
Kulldorff explained that while the children, indeed, are “about as likely to be infected as adults,” there is also “more than a thousand-fold difference in mortality risk between the old and the young,” and called the risk of young children, even those under the age of one, of dying from COVID “minuscule.”
He also stressed that children are not major spreaders of the virus, and that vaccination is “not a burden that we should put on children” in order to protect those at higher risk of getting the disease.
Meanwhile, the CDC has never studied how many of the reported 567 COVID deaths in children aged 0-17 were incidental to the virus versus caused by it, per Kulldorff.
Last week, during the Florida Summit on COVID, some of the nation’s top medical scientists sounded the alarm against a push to vaccinate a population which has essentially zero chances of dying from COVID while being at risk of developing severe complications from the experimental shots.
International researchers are also questioning the need to vaccinate children against COVID.
The Elsevier medical journal Toxicology Reports notes that “the COVID-19 attributed deaths per capita are negligible in children” while “the normalized post-inoculation deaths are small, but not negligible, in children.”
The largest medical experimentation in human history, as Dr. Robert Malone called it, continues, and is now enrolling the youngest humans. Is it not the “final frontier” that the government and the pharmaceutical companies should not be allowed to cross?
