Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and top medical advisor to Joe Biden, said Friday that he hopes to see kids begin to get vaccinated for COVID-19 within the next few months, describing it as a necessary step for establishing nationwide immunity against the virus.
As of yet, vaccines have not been approved for children, though testing is currently underway for those as young as 12.
Should those trials prove successful, Fauci said they would then follow them up with testing for children below nine years.
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“Hopefully by the time we get to the late spring and early summer we will have children being able to be vaccinated,” Fauci said at a White House coronavirus briefing.
Fauci also hoped that vaccines will become more plentiful in the coming months. As of Thursday, only about 1.3 percent of Americans had been fully vaccinated with the required two doses of the currently available vaccines.
Children make up about one-fourth of the U.S. population. According to establishment figures such as Fauci, about 70 to 80 percent of the population must be vaccinated in order for the country to achieve “herd immunity.”
“Children tend to not become as severely ill as adults but they can still become ill and some have tragically died,” said Dr. Leana Wen, a public health expert and emergency room physician, who supports Fauci’s goal. “Children can also be vectors of transmission, and getting children vaccinated is important as we strive for herd immunity.”
Of the two vaccines being distributed with government authorization in the United States, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is to be given to those 16 years and older. Moderna’s vaccines is for those of ages 18 and above.
Prizer’s clinical round of trials for children 12 to 15 is fully enrolled, meaning the drug maker could seek emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for children 12 and older at some point in the first half of this year.
Initial tests for the validation and effectiveness of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have involved tens of thousands of people, which allows the age-related testing on children to be conducted with smaller groups.
“You don’t want to have to … go through an efficacy trial, where you’re involving tens of thousands of children,” Fauci explained. “What you can do, is in a much smaller trial, measured in hundreds to a couple of thousands … what we call safety and … immunogenicity,” the term for when a vaccine triggers an immune system response.
The U.S. is currently administering one million vaccines a day to adults, a pace government officials believe to be inefficient. The Biden administration wants to raise that to at least 1.5 million a day.
The Associated Press reports:
Two more vaccines from American companies are nearing the stage where the FDA can evaluate them for approval. One from Johnson & Johnson requires only a single shot.
Biden has also set a goal of reopening most schools by the summer, and directed government agencies to work with communities to advance it.
His American Rescue Plan legislation in Congress calls for $50 billion to finance a major expansion of testing, which is seen as necessary for the safe reopening of schools and businesses. That’s because robust testing can detect early outbreaks before they spread through a community and trigger shutdowns. Testing in the U.S. had a chaotic start, and experts say in many parts of the country it’s still subpar.
The question is, why are we talking about vaccinating children for a virus that already has a 98 percent survival rate for the general public, but whose threat to children is statistically irrelevant?
Establishment voices say so that we can have “herd immunity,” but in what way does giving kids a shot for an illness that isn’t dangerous to them in the first place achieve herd immunity?
After all, the scientific establishment itself has reminded us that even with the vaccine, you can still contract and transmit COVID-19 — hence their insistence that people continue to “mask up,” social distance, and stay at home even with the shot being mass-distributed.
The real danger is allowing mass hysteria to goad us into vaccinating our children with a dangerous, hastily-tested shot.
Americans must be aware that the government will try to force parents to vaccinate their kids by making it a requirement to go to school. Concerned parents should begin contacting their local lawmakers and school board members preemptively to ensure this doesn’t happen.
