The Biden administration is poised to stick a needle filled with experimental gene therapeutics, aka COVID vaccine, in every arm, no matter how tiny. After all, the president claimed that we can get “back to normal” when 98 percent of Americans are inoculated. As Biden’s top medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, once said, “We ultimately would like to get and have to get children into that mix.”
Right now, the Biden administration’s COVID task force is making its final preparations for a COVID vaccination campaign intended for American children aged five to 11, according to ABC News.
The outlet obtained an audio of a phone conversation between White House COVID coordinator Jeff Zients and U.S. governors, in which Zients stated the administration possessed enough pediatric doses of the Pfizer shot for 28 million children. The cohort is expected to become eligible for vaccination once the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) approve the shot. The first is expected to say if it recommends children to receive the shot on October 26, and the latter will be meeting to issue a final approval on November 2-3.
Per the outlet, once the feds green-light the shots, the doses will be immediately sent to “thousands of sites, including pediatricians, family doctors, hospitals, health clinics and pharmacies enrolled in a federal program that guarantees the shots are provided for free.” Schools in some of states will be providing the shots as well.
Zients claimed that the infrastructure to deliver COVID jabs to American youngsters would be “similar to what we’ve used for the other vaccines.”
Zients also warned that states should expect parents to be “rushing” to get their kids inoculated, so the governors would need to make sure the appointment system works smoothly. “It’s important that all of us recognize that parents have been waiting for a pediatric vaccine for a long time so they will understandably be very eager to get their kids vaccinated or kids vaccinated right away,” he stressed.
Is Zients correct about parents being “eager” to vaccinate their young children? Even the mainstream media doubts it.
According to a New York Times report, when the prospect of minors receiving COVID shots started to materialize in late September with Pfizer submitting safety data for the FDA review, many parents indicated they were reluctant to get their little ones jabbed.
The biggest concern parents raised was the shot’s safety. One mom from California, who was vaccinated herself, said she “was nowhere near ready to vaccinate her children, who are 8, 6 and 3, against Covid-19.” Further, she expressed worry about the risks for her children, partly because of the relatively small size of children’s trials and the lack of long-term safety data so far.
Indeed, while the typical timeline for vaccine development spans from five to 10 years, with phase III clinical trials taking some two to four years, Pfizer only started testing its jabs on healthy 6-month to 11-year old children at the end of March 2021. The FDA stated the evaluation of the safety data on the possible side effects in children would be based on “at least about two months” of follow-ups.
It is worth mentioning that all of the currently available COVID shots for adults have yet to complete clinical trials, with the earliest completion date set for May of 2023.
The number of participants in Pfizer final trials was not large either, and enrolled 2,268 children. How could Pfizer trace and study such types of potential side effects as “uncommon,” “rare” or “very rare”? No matter how “low” a risk, parents need that information to make an informed decision.
It comes as no surprise that parents believe that the potential risk from a new vaccine seem to outweigh the benefits, because young children have been far less likely than adults to become seriously sick with COVID, per the Times.
The polls show that many American parents are not at all “eager to rush” to the vaccination sites.
The C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health found in July that more than half of parents of children ages three to 11 said they were unlikely to have their children vaccinated against COVID. A Kaiser Family Foundation national survey conducted in August revealed that only 26 percent of parents would vaccinate their five-to-11-year-olds right away.
The leftist Atlantic posted an article titled “Many Parents Won’t Vaccinate Their Kids. Here’s Why” penned by Aaron E. Carroll, professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine.
Carroll explains that first of all, parents of young children tend to be skeptical of new vaccines, no matter how well-tested and how few side effects they may cause, even if they promise protection from a virus that is common and contagious.
Second, most American parents of young children are between the ages of 25 and 39, and only 55 percent of them have been inoculated themselves. “We can expect that parents who have chosen not to vaccinate themselves are not likely to vaccinate their children quickly, if at all. We can even expect that some who did get vaccinated themselves will still be reluctant, at first, to immunize their children,” notes Carroll.
Third, some 60 percent of the 10,000 parents that Indiana University surveyed said they would not vaccinate their children if someone else in their household had already been infected. That is due to the belief that children who have been exposed to the virus have already developed a natural immunity to it. Given the latter may grant a much stronger and more lasting protection than any of the jabs, why take a risk with a jab? It is also likely that young parents who have contracted COVID themselves, like most Americans, have had only mild symptoms, if any, and therefore are not terrified of COVID.
The main force behind high vaccination rates among children is school mandates.
And that is what California is already implementing. On October 1, Governor Gavin Newsom announced he would make the injections mandatory for all “eligible” students participating in in-person learning at both public and private schools. COVID guru Dr. Fauci supports mandatory COVID vaccinations for schoolchildren.
