In a previous essay, I discussed what it means to be pro-vaccine by saying “being pro-vaccine means taking into account all of the relevant data to make a fair, accurate risk-benefit calculation about a vaccine”. I also discussed what it means to be anti-vaccine by saying:
Obviously there is no clear-cut criteria for who is anti-vaccine, and there is a very wide spectrum of beliefs in the anti-vaccine movement. Some people proudly announce they are anti-vaxxers, while other notorious spreaders of anti-vaccine misinformation, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., adamantly reject this label. To me, the core that unites anti-vaccine thought is: 1) inappropriate minimization of the risk of the virus, and 2) inappropriate minimization of the safety and efficacy of the vaccine.
With this in mind, I thought a quiz might be in order. Below are 200 quotes about COVID-19, vaccines, and children. About half are taken from leading anti-vaccine cranks such as RFK Jr. and Dr. Joseph Mercola. The rest come from contrarian doctors who would bristle at any suggestion that they are anything other than pro-vaccine.
Can you tell who said what?
There are a few ground rules. First, I removed links in the quotes themselves and occasionally added my own links within the quotes to refute the misinformation contained within. Second, I used images to correct some blatant factual errors or provided relevant updates. Finally, since they support his overall message, several articles by contrarian doctors have been featured on RFK Jr.’s website. So pay attention to the author when you click on the links.
Most importantly, I urge you to also read these quotes in their full context. For example, consider this statement: “The vast majority of kids with COVID-19 will be fine. A child who contracts COVID-19 has an extremely low risk of dying.” Not only do I completely agree with this, I wrote it, and I’ve said as much in every article I’ve written on this topic. Yet, it is indistinguishable from this Quote from RFK Jr.’s site, “Children’s risk of developing serious COVID illness is minuscule”.`
However, there’s an essential difference. I’ve been clear in my articles that while the risk to any individual child is very low, COVID-19’s overall impact on children has been significant. I’ve enumerated how the virus has gravely harmed a large number of children and said,
It may be true that any individual child’s risk of dying of COVID-19 is “practically zero”, but there’s a world of difference between “practically zero” and actually zero when tens of millions of children get infected.
According to the CDC’s COVID Data Tracker, 1,300 children have died. To me, that’s a tragically large number of deceased children. Many thousands more children have been hospitalized, some needing ICU-level care and mechanical ventilation. There have been at least 6,851 cases of MIS-C and 59 children have died from this. I also share robust evidence the vaccine is extremely effective at preventing rare, but catastrophic outcomes in children. I try to make my articles nuanced and informative. And as I’ll do in this essay, I’ll share information about some of the individual children who died. It’s important that we view them as individuals who were robbed on their entire life, not just numbers on a CDC website.
All this stands in marked contrast to the articles (or tweets) from which I took the quotes below. The information in these articles may be accurate, however it is always incomplete. Any information that disconfirms the author’s viewpoint is purposefully omitted to advance a grossly distorted narrative. The authors of the quotes below never share the basic numbers about how COVID has harmed children, as I just did. The multiple studies showing vaccines help keep children alive and out of the hospital are similarly unmentionable. These writers don’t take “into account all of the relevant data to make a fair, accurate risk-benefit calculation”.
For example, in the quotes below you’ll see references to a study from Germany that found no healthy children 5 and under died of COVID-19. However, the writers who share this study neglect to mention that it concluded in May 2021, before the Delta or Omicron variants, and that studies from the US found that about 20% of fatalities in young people occur in healthy individuals. The German study is a fine study, it just doesn’t tell the whole story. Similarly, there are many positive references to several Scandinavian countries that are not vaccinating all children, without reference to the fact that they are the outliers. Almost all countries with abundant vaccine supply are vaccinating children.
Additionally, there will be claims that over 100% of American children have had COVID-19, and claims that 1,300 COVID-19 deaths is the same as 6 flu deaths. There will be misinformation about the variants. And there will be a lot of quotes about vaccine side effects.
Overall, these quotes reflect several central themes of many doctors this pandemic. These are:
- The virus is benign or even beneficial for children
- The vaccine is dangerous
- Anyone who tells you otherwise can’t be trusted/I’m the real victim here
Crucially, none of the individuals of the quoted below (with one exception) unequivocally say, “Parents should absolutely vaccinate their children against COVID-19”. Despite this, many individuals quoted below still claim to be pro-vaccine. Since I am pro-vaccine, I absolutely feel parents should vaccinate their children against COVID-19. At this point, I see no clear difference between someone who denies the importance of the MMR or polio vaccine and someone who denies the importance of the COVID-19 vaccine for children.
Ready to test yourself? Let me know how many you get right.
The virus is benign or beneficial for children: Relax, not that many kids die
Quote: As of May 29, 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) attributed 366 deaths in children aged 0-18 to COVID out of a child population of 74 million—a mortality rate of 0.00049%.
Quote: I don’t think if there’s any good reason to vaccinate kids that young, they face a vanishingly small risk from COVID itself, near zero from mortality from COVID.
Quote: Let’s say they’re healthy. People might appropriately say, “Hey, the risk of death is infinitesimally small. Do I really need to do this?” Legitimate question. It’s not necessarily to save their life with a vaccine.
Quote: Children ages 5 to 11 are at extremely low risk of death from coronavirus. For instance, in a meta-analysis combining data from five studies, Stanford researchers Cathrine Axfors and John Ioannidis found a median infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.0027% in children ages 0-19. In children ages 5 to 11, the IFR is even lower.
Quote: An excess of 12,000 deaths sounds bad, but Professor Don Boudreaux, from George Mason University, has noted that there are nearly 88 million people in this age group.
Quote: CDC data indicate deaths among children make up a fraction of a percentage of those who have died from COVID.
Quote: Young adults and children have a miniscule risk of hospitalization. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, children comprised only 0.00%-0.23% of all COVID-19 deaths, and eight states reported zero child deaths.
Quote: No child in the trial died or required hospitalization from COVID. Without any clinical outcomes of significance, no meaningful calculation of vaccine efficacy can be made. These results should have ended any consideration of granting Pfizer authorization of its product in this age group. Pfizer’s trial essentially proved the drugmaker’s COVID vaccine, when appropriately dosed and tested against placebo in a randomized study of young children, would reduce the risk of developing common cold symptoms by approximately 2%.
Quote: Informed doctors argue that “not even a handful of children should be endangered through mass vaccination against a disease that is not dangerous to them.”
Quote: I think we’re doing this once again to children by vaccinating them without knowing what the safety is. We are asking children to accept the vaccine, to get immunized, to protect the adults. That isn’t necessary. Children just very rarely get sick.
Quote: For this vaccine, it doesn’t make sense to me why I should vaccinate my children, when the risks are so low to them. And it doesn’t actually help with reducing the risk of disease for rest of the population.
Quote: For people younger than 45, the infection fatality rate is almost 0%.
Quote: For younger adults and children, it is a different story, as their mortality risk is extremely low. Even a slight risk of a serious vaccine adverse reaction could tip the benefit-risk calculation, making the vaccine more harmful than beneficial. We have already observed rare problems with blood clots (J&J vaccine) and myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle, Pfizer and Moderna) in younger people, and additional equally serious issues might still be found.
Quote: One could vaccinate every child age 5 to 11 in the U.S. and not prevent a single hospitalization, ICU admission, or death from coronavirus — according to Pfizer’s own clinical trial data as submitted to the FDA.
Quote: For someone who is less than 65 and has no underlying diseases, the risk is completely negligible…it seems that these deaths are extremely exceptional.
Quote: There are 104 children age 0-17 who died from COVID-19 and 287 from COVID + Influenza – out of ~72 million. This equals zero risk. And we doctors won’t stand for children being offered something they do not need and of whom some unknown percentage will suffer.
The virus is benign or beneficial for children: Relax, it’s just sick kids who die
Quote: We have always known that it’s very hard for the virus to hurt someone who is young and healthy.
Quote: We have since learned that 99.997% of young people ages 0-19 survive COVID-19 (with most experiencing either mild symptoms or no symptoms at all). But that does not seem to matter. Nor does a January 2021 study, which confirmed that it is only in a minuscule subset of children — mostly kids with serious underlying medical conditions — that the illness occasionally takes a turn for the worse.
Quote: A large study conducted in Germany showed zero deaths for children under 5 and a case fatality rate of three out of a million in children without comorbidities.
Quote: A study from Germany found that among healthy, unvaccinated children aged 5–11 who became infected with the disease, just 8 in 100,000 ended up in the ICU and none died.
Quote: Our report found a mortality rate of zero among children w/o a pre-existing medical condition such as leukemia.
Quote: Children have a 99.995% recovery rate, and a body of medical literature indicates that almost zero healthy children under five years old have died from COVID.
Quote: Johns Hopkins study monitoring 48,000 children diagnosed with COVID showed a zero mortality rate in children under 18 without comorbidities.
Quote: The COVID-19 death risk is clustered among kids with a comorbid condition, like obesity. Of the more than 330 COVID-19 deaths in kids under age 25, there’s good preliminary data suggesting that most or nearly all appear to be in kids with a pre-existing condition.
Quote: The Germany study shows that risks to healthy kids are very low. It also shows the massive efforts that try to distort risk.
Quote: In reviewing the medical literature and news reports, and in talking to pediatricians across the country, I am not aware of a single healthy child in the U.S. who has died of COVID-19 to date.
Quote: A study in Nature demonstrated that children under 18 with no comorbidities have virtually no risk of death.
Quote: There’s never been a documented case of an entirely healthy kid dying of COVID.
The virus is benign or beneficial for children: We shouldn’t try to prevent pediatric COVID-19 deaths because older people die more and other things kill more kids
Quote: So that’s of 100,000 kids infected maybe 2 would pass away. And to put that in perspective, when you talk about people who are 80, it’s 7,500 times as much.
Quote: The image below, put out by the CDC one year into the pandemic, shows that an 88-year-old has 8,700 times the risk of death of an 8-year-old.
Quote: While the death of any child is a tragedy, Covid-19 is less deadly to children than many other risks we accept as a matter of course, including drowning, vehicle accidents, and even cardiovascular disease.
Quote: To put that in perspective, in that same age group during non-Covid times, the risk of suicide is 10 times higher. For young adults ages 15 to 24, the risk of dying from Covid19 was 9.9 in 1,000,000, and they are also generally 10 times more likely to commit suicide.
Quote: As a cause of death for children aged 1-17, COVID-19 ranks behind injury, suicide, cancer, homicide, congenital anomalies, heart disease, influenza, chronic lower respiratory disease and cerebrovascular causes.
Quote: While anyone can get infected, there is more than a thousand-fold difference in mortality risk between the old and the young…It will take a few years until we know the Covid vaccine risk profile, and until then, we do not know whether there is more benefit or harm in vaccinating children.
Quote: These data are as real as it gets: Vaccinated 40-year-olds have higher population risks than unvaccinated kids under the age of 18 for COVID-19. You would not know that from the breathless, innumerate U.S. media landscape, but once you know it you might feel differently about risk.
The virus is benign or beneficial for children: Variants, shmariants
Quote: Variants, shmariants.
Quote: We’ve done far too much damage to a generation of children over infinitesimally small risks. Unwarranted fear of variants cannot be used as an excuse to continue propagating this harm.
Quote: Younger people who get the Delta variant don’t get sick that need to be in the hospital.
Quote: Children are not more susceptible to the delta variant, they’re threefold less likely to get any infection with any variant with any ancestral strain.
Quote: Omicron infection may be nature’s vaccine.
Quote: Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), stated earlier in January there is no evidence that the Omicron variant causes more severe illness in children, when compared to earlier strains of the virus, raising questions about the need to vaccinate young children.
Quote: In the context of the Omicron variant, which is associated with less severe disease and lower hospitalization rates, the benefit-risk ratio of COVID-19 vaccination for children 5-11 years of age becomes even harder to justify.
Quote: The risk-benefit ratio of the COVID shot is becoming even more inverted with the emergence of Omicron, as this variant produces far milder illness than previous variants, putting children at even lower risk of hospitalization or death from infection than they were before, and their risk was already negligible.
Quote: Even children for whom vaccination is not yet an option are at lower risk now than they were last summer: the Omicron variant resulted in 66% fewer hospitalizations than Delta in a study of children younger than 5 years.
The virus is benign or beneficial for children: “Natural” immunity
Quote: An FDA senior advisor for risk-benefit assessment admitted that should natural immunity be equal to vaccine-induced immunity, then that would result in a 45% reduction of all the benefits in the FDA’s risk-benefit analyses.
Quote: Last week, the CDC released a large study demonstrating that natural immunity is superior to vaccinated immunity.
Quote: For these millions of children, the risks of COVID-19 vaccination outweigh the benefits, as studies show natural immunity is superior to vaccine-induced immunity.
Quote: Recovered COVID patients have strong long-lasting protection against severe disease if reinfected, and evidence about protective immunity after natural infection is at least as good as from the vaccines. Hence, it makes no sense to require vaccines for recovered patients.
Quote: Requiring the vaccine in people who are already immune with natural immunity has no scientific support.
Quote: The FDA’s risk-benefit assessment failed to account for the large proportion of children in the United States who already had COVID-19, recovered from it and now have natural immunity.
Quote: Don’t ignore scientific facts just because they don’t fit a policy imperative. For example, for most people, a Covid-19 infection results in a substantial immune response—what’s called “natural immunity.” But our officials, because of their singular focus on vaccines, have essentially ignored this basic fact, pretending natural immunity doesn’t exist.
Quote: Shielding kids from exposure only increases their future risk. This is partly why the UK does not vaccinate against chickenpox. Serious complications from the disease are rare among children, and the circulating virus allows adults to be naturally boosted against reactivation-driven shingles. By rebuilding population immunity among the least at-risk, moreover, we help buffer risk for those most vulnerable.
Quote: Many lives are being destroyed by the government’s failure to recognize natural immunity.
Quote: By ignoring the reality of natural immunity in favor of their desired policy of triple vaccination, our officials are not making us safer. They are undermining the trust that is essential between the experts and the public.
Quote: When it comes to infectious disease, normality means a world where they are routinely exposed to, and overcome, viral illness. For children, getting sick and recovering is part of a natural and healthy life.
The virus is benign or beneficial for children: Children should get sick to avoid getting sick and they don’t spread the disease
Quote: School closures may also diminish the chances of developing herd immunity in an age group that is spared serious disease.
Quote: Yes, diseases will continue to circulate, as they always have done. Schools are not sterile, nor should they be. Immunity is built through illness.
Quote: The need to let young people interact with each other, both for social reasons and for herd immunity, makes perfectly good common sense. I think there should have been more of that.
Quote: Not only are children at high risk for severe adverse events from the shots, but having healthy, unvaccinated children in the population is crucial to achieving herd immunity.
Quote: This view is shared by the authors of a May 2021 paper in The British Journal of Medicine, who wrote: “Once most adults are vaccinated, circulation of SARS-CoV-2 may in fact be desirable, as it is likely to lead to primary infection early in life when disease is mild, followed by booster re-exposures throughout adulthood… This would keep reinfections mild and immunity up to date.”
Quote: When children do get the disease, they’ll likely have lifelong immunity.
Quote: It’s time to allow children to resume normal life, not simply because their exclusion is unfair or hurts them socially and psychologically, but because it is immunologically in their best interest.
Quote: With Covid, the nadir of risk is between 5–11 years old — an age where children develop more robust and durable immunity from infection than adults, even with asymptomatic silent infections.
Quote: The epidemiologist and researcher Francois Balloux puts it this way: “I’m not sure how to convey this message in a half-acceptable way. But, if the objective were to send SARCoV2 into endemicity, then healthy kids have to be exposed to the virus, ideally earlier than later. This is not ‘eugenism’; it is bog-standard infection disease epidemiology.” This idea is not as frightening as it may sound.
Quote: It has become common to criticize restrictions for children on the grounds that they harm mental health and social development. These concerns are valid, but it is important to emphasize that a more laissez-faire approach to kids and Covid makes public health sense, too. Dropping masks, quarantines, distancing, and all other mitigations will allow children to develop the kind of broad immunity gained by living a normal life.
Quote: Parents must consider that exposures are how we best protect our children against the variants of the future.
Quote: It is reckless to let children age into a more serious encounter with a disease best dealt with while younger.
Quote: These measures are premised on the idea that America’s children must be shielded from exposure to Covid-19. What kids really need, however, is a return to normal.
Quote: COVID-19 policies have disproportionately affected children — viewing children primarily as vectors of disease rather than as highly valued and vulnerable members of our society to be nurtured and cherished.
Quote: Multiple studies attribute this to a stronger innate immune response in the upper respiratory tract that prevents viral replication early on. This may explain why children are also far less likely to contribute to disease transmission.
Quote: But remember, COVID is a disease that’s passed from adults to adults. This is not a disease that spread to a large extent by children to adults.
The virus is benign or beneficial for children: Impossible numbers
Quote: The (vaccine’s) benefits (at best) are going to be very small — what is lower than 3 per million? — so even rare safety signals can tip the scale.
Quote: In addition, the risk of death or other bad outcomes is low for children. Between March and October of 2020, among those between the ages of five and 14, the risk of dying of Covid-19 in the United States was 1 in 1,000,000.
Quote: Children and young adults are very low risk for severe disease, about one in a million chance of death for a child under 19 from COVID.
Quote: Kids can get covid-19 and kids can die from covid-19. But it’s extremely rare How rare? 1 in a million for kids <15 To put this in context, school-age kids are 10x more likely to die by suicide than covid-19
Quote: The FDA’s risk-benefit analysis estimated that fully vaccinating 1 million children ages 5-11 would prevent one COVID-19 death.
Quote: About one in a million kids passed away from SARS-CoV-2. Now, that’s an unfortunate end point, but to put it in perspective in that same age group the risk of suicide in non-COVID times is typically 10 times higher. So yes, kids are not invincible from it, but realistically their chance of dying from SARS-CoV-2 is not out of the ballpark with other respiratory viruses in that age group.
The virus is benign or beneficial for children: COVID-19 (1,300 deaths in two years) is the same as the flu (6 deaths in two years)
Quote: Depending on the study one looks at, COVID is slightly less dangerous or roughly equivalent to the flu in children.
Quote: Very few healthy, young children died from this virus, more died from the flu last year.
Quote: The risk to children is greater from influenza than #COVID19
Quote: Schools are major transmission points for influenza, but not for COVID. While children do get infected, their risk for COVID death is minuscule, lower than their already low risk of dying from the flu.
Quote: For the unvaccinated child, COVID presents a health risk to children that is on par with the flu.
Quote: Their (children’s) Covid mortality risk is miniscule and less than the already low risk from the annual influenza, so the vaccine benefit for healthy children is very small.
Quote: It is generally not controversial to argue that SARS-CoV-2 in kids is roughly, roughly the same as influenza, maybe even less severe than influenza, seasonal influenza in kids.
Quote: First, children are at extremely low risk of severe COVID-19. Even before the emergence of omicron, which is considerably more mild than earlier strains, the virus was less deadly to children than flu and pneumonia, heart disease, car crashes or guns.
Quote: COVID is on par with Flu in terms of risk to kids.
Quote: COVID-19 is less of a threat to children than accidents or the common flu. The survival rate among American children with confirmed cases is approximately 99.99%; remarkably, recent studies find an even higher survival rate.
The virus is benign or beneficial for children: But Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
Quote: It is easy to understand why Sweden decided against recommending COVID-19 vaccines for children 5-11 years old. Arguing that the benefits did not outweigh the risks, a Swedish Health Agency official stated: “With the knowledge we have today, with a low risk for serious disease for kids, we don’t see any clear benefit with vaccinating them.”
Quote: In fact, Norwegian authorities believe that natural infection will better protect children than vaccines that rely on out-of-date variants of the virus.
Quote: Norway opted to make COVID vaccines optional for children aged 5-11.
Quote: According to the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, “the risk of a severe disease course at this age is small, and the need for vaccines for children and adolescents is limited”.
Quote: The Norwegian Institute of Public Health stated the risk of severe illness in children that is brought on by COVID is small, and that as a result, the need for children to receive a COVID vaccine is limited. Norway’s announcement, in turn, prompted the Danish Pediatric Society to request that Denmark’s Health Authority revisit its decision to recommend COVID-19 vaccination for children in Denmark.
The vaccine is dangerous: General fear mongering
Quote: So let’s say to save that one life, you gotta inoculate a million kids with vaccination to save one life. And you’re talking about maybe 14,000 kids suffering grade three fevers, and maybe 880 suffering grade four fevers, which is more than one day. And I guess when you add in the myalgia, when you add in the arthralgia, when you add in the sort of headache, the fogginess, all these things, I mean.
Quote: Before we give an intervention (the vaccine) to a kid who has almost no risk, I think we should use the precautionary principle.
Quote: The Pfizer mRNA shot fails any honest risk-benefit analysis in children ages 5 to 11.
Quote: My greatest concern with the vaccination of children under the age of 18 is the fact that there is no prior study of these individuals before Dec. of 2020.
Quote: At the same time, they haven’t really tested the vaccine on enough children to know that with any confidence with the adverse – serious adverse event rate is anything more than zero. And you say you wouldn’t the balanced this doesn’t work. Why would I vaccinate my kid against something but disease for whom but it’s not actually all that deadly? Where there’s might be some serious adverse events, I think that it is a mistake to think about this, as good for kids. It’s not good for kids.
Quote: Not only is this injection medically unnecessary for this younger age group, but there are clear signals coming from U.S. government sources that the risk to human health is real, and that adverse events to this vaccine are not rare.
Quote: Imagine you do this to hundreds of thousands of children. Just by sheer happenstance, you’re gonna have a certain number of complications, just in terms of febrile complications.
Quote: By Pfizer’s own admission, there were zero hospitalizations, ICU admissions, or deaths in the treatment or control group in their study of 2,300 children ages 5 to 11.
Quote: With a recovery rate of 99.997%, children are not at great risk of serious health consequences from COVID-19 infections — but they are at significant risk of adverse events from the vaccine.
Quote: The CDC reports that children are less likely to develop severe illness or die from Covid-19 and are more likely to be asymptomatic or show mild systems. And there are lower rates of infection among children compared with adults. (We) demand that CDC provide the reasoning behind these perplexing recommendations. Why would a vaccine be recommended that perhaps carries more risk to children’s health than the actual disease, and which has no long term safety data to support its use?
The vaccine is dangerous: Did you know the vaccine causes myocarditis and myocarditis and myocarditis and myocarditis and myocarditis and myocarditis?
Quote: In early September 2021, Tracy Beth Hoeg and colleagues posted an analysis of VAERS data on the preprint server medRxiv, showing that more than 86% of the children aged 12 to 17 who report symptoms of myocarditis were severe enough to require hospitalization.
Quote: Sorry to break it to you, vaccines can have risks of myocarditis EXCEEDING risks of myocarditis from infection.
Quote: Moreover, the FDA’s risk-benefit assessment did not account for a potentially necessary booster dose after five months. Each booster dose would carry an additional risk of myocarditis, along with the risk of other vaccine adverse events.
Quote: In total, that’s 1,475 cases of myocarditis in teens aged 18 and younger — five times the background rate. And again, this does not take into account the underreporting rate, which has been calculated to be anywhere from five to 40.
Quote: By adjusting for natural immunity (with a 42% reduction of vaccine benefits), 39 ICU stays are prevented by vaccination, but at the risk of 57 vaccine-related myopericarditis ICU stays. Additionally, while 118 hospitalizations are prevented by vaccination, this is at the risk of 156 vaccine-related myopericarditis hospitalizations, for 5-11-year-old boys and girls.
Quote: If myocarditis occurs in boys ages 5-11 at the same rate as in boys 12-15, a study of this size would not be able to document that. We are flying blind on a side effect that parents need to be informed about.
Quote: Using the FDA’s risk-benefit analysis (shown above) and conservatively adjusting for 42% of children having already acquired natural immunity through prior COVID-19 infection, the risk of hospitalization from vaccine-related heart inflammation in 5 to 11 year-old boys is greater than the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations prevented by vaccination.
Quote: So, is it actually true that “For adolescents and young adults, the risk of myocarditis caused by COVID infection is much higher than after mRNA vaccination.”? I doubt it.
Quote: It is clear that the second dose brings WAY more hospitalizations from myocarditis than can possibly be prevented.
Quote: I don’t think people realize the damage continuing to push two doses in young men will do.
Quote: How is this possibly an acceptable tradeoff for a virus you have practically zero risk of dying from as a child or adolescent?
Quote: Note that more than 95% of myocarditis cases detected by the CDC resulted in hospitalization; it seems very likely that 2nd doses of mRNA vaccines will cause more hospitalizations than they will prevent in 12–17 year old boys.
Quote: In summary, based on CDC statistics, we could expect just over two teens to contract myocarditis from COVID-19 infection. Meanwhile, we have 1,475 cases reported following the COVID jab in just six months (shots for 12- to 17-year-olds were authorized July 30, 2021).
Quote: The risk is also dose-dependent, with boys having a sixfold greater risk of myocarditis following the second dose. While our health authorities are shrugging off this risk saying cases are “mild,” that’s a frightening lie. The damage to the heart is typically permanent.
Quote: While the CDC says that myocarditis is a mild disease, cardiologists know otherwise. CDC’s own preliminary data, reported at the February 4 ACIP meeting, revealed that nearly half of the young people diagnosed with myocarditis still had symptoms 3 months later, and 39% had their activity restricted by their physician. We know this serious adverse event frequently occurs in teenagers. But no one knows how often it occurs in younger children. This is of major concern for babies and younger children.
Quote: No one says “vaccine induced myocarditis is mostly mild” like someone who just saw a graph that 20% of people 37 weeks later have not fully recovered.
Quote: Prior to the EUA expansion to 12-15 year-olds, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) showed two deaths in 15-year-olds who had each received a Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. These adolescents may have been enrolled in clinical trials, as they could not otherwise have received the vaccines legally at the time. With about 1,000 adolescents 12-15 years old in Pfizer’s clinical trial vaccine group—and about the same number in Moderna’s trial—the death rate following either vaccination in this age group may be approximately 0.1% (two in 2,000)—over 200 times higher than the COVID-19 mortality rate.
Quote: With potentially deadly side effects including myocarditis and pericarditis disproportionately impacting youth it is reasonable to think that over time, the rate of fatal side effects from mRNA shots in children ages 5 to 11 might be similar to those in ages 12 to 24.
Quote: I wish the CDC would tell us more about the deaths of Simone Scott, 19, and Jacob Clynick, 13, both of whom died shortly after getting a second vaccine dose and developed heart inflammation. There have been 19 other deaths in youth under age 25, according to the CDC.
Quote: In the meantime, the mortality rate of vaccine-associated myocarditis cases remains uncertain. Under questioning during the meeting, Matthew Oster reported that for myocarditis unrelated to COVID-19 or COVID-19 vaccines, mortality rates are estimated in the range of 4%–9% in the literature. Fortunately, it seems likely that the rate is not so high for vaccine or COVID-19 associated myocarditis. But the rate is likely not zero, and the CDC is already investigating one possible death associated with a 2nd dose of Pfizer vaccine in a 13 year old, over a time period where no deaths would be expected to be avoided from 2nd doses of mRNA vaccines in this age group.
Quote: Maybe the rate of death from the vaccine parallels the rate of death from COVID in a healthy child.
Quote: Subjecting healthy children and babies to this vaccine poses a much greater risk through potential severe adverse reactions and even death.
Quote: Based on the data of kids w/ NO comorbid, an estimated 0-10 kids 5-11 have ever died of Covid VS. Approx 15 would die from the vax 2nd dose (extrap from adolescents).
Quote: If you inject that many children, you certainly will have lots and lots of serious side effects, including disability and death.
The vaccine is dangerous: The Emergency Use Authorization should not have been issued and childhood vaccination should stop
Quote: Children incur almost no risk from virus. Has the safety signal from JNJ & AZ given you no pause? #WeNeedFarMoreSafetyData for kids.
Quote: COVID-19 rates in children ages 5 to 11 are so low that there were ZERO cases of severe COVID-19 and ZERO cases of death from COVID in either the treatment (n= 1,518) or control group (n= 750). So any claims you see in the press about the Pfizer vaccine being “90% effective” in children are meaningless because they are referring to mild cases from which children usually recover quickly (and then have robust broad spectrum immunity). So there is literally no emergency in this population for which one could apply for Emergency Use Authorization.
Quote: Unlike for adults, however, the likelihood of severe outcomes or death associated with COVID-19 infection is very low for children, undermining the appropriateness of an EUA for child COVID-19 vaccines.
Quote: What we do know is that there is no public health emergency for this age group. Children are at extremely low risk of serious outcomes from COVID.
Quote: No further expansion of the EUAs to children under the age of 16 be granted.
Quote: If an EUA is granted, Pfizer’s pediatric vaccine will be available to nearly 20 million children under the age of five, many of whom already have robust natural immunity.
Quote: Mandating the COVID-19 vaccine thus threatens not only public health but also the future of science.
Quote: As the FDA plainly states in its COVID vaccine fact sheets, vaccines administered under EUA status are not FDA-approved and have “not undergone the same type of review as an FDA-approved or cleared product.”
Quote: We insist that the EUA not be relinquished prematurely; certainly not before trials are complete
Quote: The rarity of severe COVID-19 outcomes for children means that trials cannot demonstrate that the balance of the benefits of vaccination against the potential adverse effects are favorable to the children themselves. In short, given the rarity of severe clinical courses and limited clarity of risks, the criteria for Emergency Use Authorization do not appear to be met for children.
Quote: The EUAs should never have been granted, the EUAs should be revoked immediately.
Quote: An EUA might not be appropriate for a childhood vaccine given that the risk to kids is so low.
Quote: (I call) for health agencies to immediately halt the administration of COVID-19 vaccines to minors, whether in clinical trials or under Emergency Use Authorization.
Quote: I would also vote to suspend mRNA vaccination <18, as in line with the United Kingdom.
Quote: We could learn how safe this vaccine is if he and his fellow advisory panel members demanded that a properly powered and designed trial were conducted prior to deploying the vaccine to tens of millions of children. In any case, we have started giving it. When will we learn how safe this vaccine is? More importantly, what should we do in the meantime? Pause childhood vaccinations until data can be collected and deaths investigated? Or carry on while testing it on infants 6 months of age and older?
Quote: In other words, from a risk/benefit perspective it is more logical to… halt childhood vaccinations immediately.
“They” can’t be trusted: Pfizer, the CDC, the FDA and I’m the real victim here
Quote: Is this what we’ve come to, pharma tells us what to do and the CDC just falls in line?
Quote: Reporting only relative risk, Pfizer declared its injection “100% effective” for 12- to 15-year-olds on the basis of trials with 2,260 younger adolescents and 18 cases of COVID-19 in the placebo group (versus zero in the vaccine group). These numbers equate to a “teensy-tiny” reduction in absolute risk.
Quote: After a “positive” trial in which just over 1100 kids aged 12 to 15 years received an mRNA vaccine, a movement arose to vaccinate young and old alike. I put “positive” in quotes for two reasons: The first is that this trial measured noninferiority of the immune response, not clinical outcomes. That was necessary because so few kids get sick with COVID-19. The other reason is that the authors claimed a favorable safety profile, but 1100 kids is not enough to inform the safety of a vaccine that will be given to many millions.
Quote: Pfizer learned its lesson with the adult trial, so when the drugmaker conducted a trial of its mRNA vaccine in children ages 5 to 11 it intentionally made it too small (only 2,300 participants) and too short (only followed up for 2 months) in order to hide harms.
Quote: The US FDA must halt use of Moderna in Men <40, as other nations have. Just like they dragged their feet with J&J and VITT (vaccine induced thrombocytopic thrombosis), they drag their feet here, and people needlessly suffer due to their inaction.
Quote: The FDA is making a huge regulatory gamble with boosters, and they are cheered on by many who are not adept at data analysis. Boosting 16-40 yo men might not be in their best interest (it might be net detrimental).
Quote: It appears Pfizer was not even trying to conduct a responsible clinical trial of its mRNA shot in kids ages 5 to 11. Pfizer submitted an EUA application to the FDA showing no health benefit in children ages 5 to 11 and the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biologics Products Advisory Committee approved it anyway.
Quote: The FDA relied upon a critically flawed risk-benefit assessment to justify EUA of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for children 5-11 years of age.
Quote: Despite the importance and gravity of the topic, and the high level at which this discussion was taking place, the presentation given to the committee (Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) for the purpose of weighing those harms and benefits was fundamentally flawed…misleading statements and data can be found throughout the slidedeck.
Quote: A new study from Germany showed extremely few deaths among healthy children overall — including zero deaths among children 5 to 11 — suggesting some studies are designed to distort the risk to kids.
Quote: Pfizer and BioNTech are evaluating a third dose because they have not yet found the right dose to maximize the risk-benefit profile for our youngest vaccine recipients. And they won’t know if three doses will work until after the first two doses are approved. This is concerning. These are our babies.
Quote: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has chosen not to report on deaths by vaccination status in this age group. We are in the same predicament that Pfizer’s severely flawed and underpowered pediatric trial left us in. With fewer than 2,200 children involved and only 1,450 receiving the vaccine, the trial did not answer any questions about safety or efficacy.
Quote: The presentation (by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) contains much flawed analysis and misleading framings of data.
Quote: Are you certain that the federal agencies tasked with this appraisal — the same agencies that have made colossal errors — are not making errors here?
Quote: Pfizer’s claim of 90.7% vaccine efficacy in this age group is based on a total of 19 children (three in a group of 1,450 vaccinated and 16 in a group of 736 placebo recipients) who developed mild symptoms during the brief trial. No child in the trial died or required hospitalization from COVID. Without any clinical outcomes of significance, no meaningful calculation of vaccine efficacy can be made.
Quote: The Pfizer vaccine fails any honest risk-benefit assessment in connection with its use in children ages 5 to 11. The FDA’s risk-benefit analysis of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine in children ages 5 to 11 is shoddy. It used tortured logic (that would be rejected by any proper academic journal) in order to reach a predetermined result that is not based in science.
Quote: Initial results of the Pfizer trial with children under 5 showed no positive effects from the vaccine. Still, the FDA invited Pfizer to submit the vaccine for approval with the hope that a third booster shot, still untested, would show a benefit.
Quote: Rather than use the weekly average COVID-19 hospitalization rate since the start of the pandemic, the FDA’s risk-benefit assessment used an arbitrary average of the four weeks prior to September 11, 2021, resulting in a COVID-19 hospitalization rate of approximately 0.74 per 100,000 children (which is nearly double the average COVID-19 hospitalization rate of 0.4 per 100,000 children). This further skewed the FDA’s risk-benefit analysis in favor of vaccination.
Quote: In this analysis the harms vs benefits of the 2nd dose appear unfavorable for ages under 25. This is true even though: This analysis segregates by age only, ignoring gender, previous COVID-19 infection or health risk factors. It still uses May hospitalization rates as the baseline expectation for the next 4 months
Quote: Pfizer looked at the level of antibodies in the bloodwork of another study, this one involving people 16 to 25 years old, figured out the level of antibodies that seems to be protective in that population, then figured out how many kids ages 5 to 11 had similar levels of antibodies in their blood, and then came up with a number for how many cases, hospitalizations, ICU admissions, and deaths would be prevented by this shot in the 5 to 11 population in the future, based on the antibody levels and health outcomes from the 16 to 25 year old population. If your head hurts from that tortured logic, it should, because such chicanery is unprecedented in a risk-benefit analysis.
Quote: With the FDA’s audacity on full display to anyone paying attention, the agency instead chose to infer a prevention effect against hospitalization and death based on antibody levels that were suggestive of protection in 16- to 25-year-olds.
Quote: During the pandemic the CDC has developed a track record of promoting flawed studies to support their preconceived policy goals.
Quote: Pediatric hospitalization rates, while used as a marker of COVID-19 disease severity in children, can be inflated by the detection of mild or asymptomatic infection via universal screening.
Quote: According to the CDC’s own analysis, 45% of COVID-19 associated hospitalizations in adolescents reported to COVID-NET (which is the source for hospitalization data in this figure) have primary causes other than COVID-19.
Quote: Even as the CDC is discussing the known cardiac risks and heart inflammation affecting children and young adults following COVID-19 vaccination, a concerted effort is underway to coerce this same group to get the vaccine anyway.
Quote: FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, CDC director Rochelle Walensky and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla have promised youngsters that COVID vaccination is their ticket to a renewed “sense of normalcy” and a “faster return to social activities.”
Quote: After correcting for the FDA’s underestimated myopericarditis rate and adjusting for natural immunity, we find that the risk of hospitalization from vaccine-related myopericarditis is greater than the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations prevented by vaccination.
Quote: Our government leaders made an implicit promise that the vaccination of adults and children would be the conduit by which our society would return to pre-pandemic freedoms.
Quote: Hospitals always run nearly full to maximize their “non-profits.” If they severity of the illness falls, they just admit less sick patients. This means however that using this as a fear monger tactic is inaccurate.
Quote: The Biden Administration, the FDA, and the CDC claim they “follow the science” and yet they violate their own standards and scientific norms in order to exaggerate the benefits and hide the harms from vaccines.
Quote: CDC has been … pushing a series of scientific results that are severely deficient, … uniquely timed to further political goals and objectives; as such, these papers appear more as propaganda than as science.
Quote: Tragically, it’s not only the CDC and FDA that have been captured by the drug industry and who are sacrificing public health, including the health of our children… Even the American Medical Association, which is supposed to lobby for physicians and medical students in the U.S. and promote medicine for the betterment of public health, has abandoned all semblance of ethics, transparency and honesty.
Quote: A tremendous number of government and private policies affecting kids are based on one number: 335. That is how many children under 18 have died with a Covid diagnosis code in their record, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet the CDC, which has 21,000 employees, hasn’t researched each death to find out whether Covid caused it or if it involved a pre-existing medical condition. Without these data, the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices decided in May that the benefits of two-dose vaccination outweigh the risks for all kids 12 to 15. I’ve written hundreds of peer-reviewed medical studies, and I can think of no journal editor who would accept the claim that 335 deaths resulted from a virus without data to indicate if the virus was incidental or causal, and without an analysis of relevant risk factors such as obesity.
Quote: Checking asymptomatic kids, the main purpose of it is essentially to close the school, to create a panic and close the school down.
Quote: CDC has repeatedly weaponized science–we need to stand against it, increase public accountability. Our health agencies need radical reform
Quote: Beyond the leaps of logic and apparent disinterest in scientific rigor — why would any medical regulatory body simply assume the same antibody levels in a 5-year-old and 25-year-old will result in the same risk of hospitalization or death from COVID without any evidence? — this unjustified assumption allowed Pfizer and the FDA to avoid taking the appropriate and necessary action: conducting a bigger and longer trial.
Quote: The CDC defines a case as a positive test for COVID-19. It doesn’t define a positive case as a person who’s sick. So, it’s really somewhat misleading.
Quote: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration relied on a critically flawed risk-benefit assessment to authorize emergency use of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for children 5-11 years of age.
Quote: VAERS is an underestimate…It’s not a perfect surveillance system. It’s a voluntary reporting surveillance system. And those kinds of surveillance systems are so easy for the doctor who sees a myocarditis to say, “Huh, this can’t be. I’ve never heard of this being linked to a vaccine. Never heard of it.”
Quote: Few doctors or nurses are aware the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) even exists, so injury reports are not being filed…Most doctors and nurses don’t even know what VAERS is and even if they do, they chose not to report the incidents.
Quote: While all three authors of the @gbdeclaration faced targeted harassment, @SunetraGupta, one of the bravest people I know, faced the worst of it. That is what happens when the head of the NIH calls a scientist ‘fringe’ and calls for a propaganda war.
Quote: Demonizing people interested in better characterizing vaccine safety signals is not pro-vax; it is pro-ignorance and anti-science.
Quote: We have a modern-day McCarthyism whenever somebody questions COVID booster shots for kids.
Quote: But, what I see more and more, among the ranks of physicians and other professionals, is a growing minority on the other end of the spectrum. These are people who are quick to label legitimate scientific dialog as “anti-vax” or “dangerous misinformation.” In many cases, the speakers have little knowledge of the issues themselves. They couple this condemnation with a strong sense that they are “morally” correct, working to purge the world of dangerous anti-vax thinking. Ironically, they are further polarizing an already polarized debate, and worse, they are simply wrong.
“They” can’t be trusted: Fauci
Quote: Dr. Fauci failed to properly consider and weigh the disastrous effects lockdowns would have.. Americans will live with—and die from—this collateral damage for many years to come.
Quote: The evidence is in. Governors, journalists, scientists, university presidents, hospital administrators and business leaders can continue to follow Dr. Anthony Fauci or open their eyes. After 700,000-plus COVID deaths and the devastating effects of lockdowns, it is time to return to basic principles of public health.
Quote: In 1984, when Fauci was appointed director of NIAID, 11.8% of Americans had chronic disease, but this has risen sharply since. Fauci doesn’t talk about this public health failure — at least not publicly.
Quote: Lab leak: At this point, there is enough evidence to suggest a serious independent investigation into lab leak take place. You cannot conduct such an investigation when the sitting NIAID director is part of the inquiry. Francis Collins has stepped down as NIH director. Fauci should step down as NIAID director to permit others to independently audit grant funding for gain of function research.
Quote: Dr. Anthony Fauci lied to Congress about funding “Gain-of Function” research in Wuhan, China when he insisted that the U.S. “has not ever, and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Quote: Fresh questions are being raised about what American scientists and federal health officials knew about the origins of the coronavirus and whether conflicting evidence was suppressed and hidden from the public.
Quote: When Fauci panic mongered about the risk to kids from COVID in May 2020, he guaranteed that poor kids in blue states would be denied a real education for nearly a full year and a half.
Quote: Fauci has been painted as a hero throughout the pandemic, an image that is not only misleading but wildly inaccurate.
Quote: Despite having this knowledge, Fauci insisted people, including children, wear masks and that those who had already had COVID be vaccinated.
Quote: The moment he lied, it was over. Even Fauci’s most ardent fans will concede that Fauci lied. He lied about masking, per his own admission. Of course, he claims he did so to protect the mask supply for healthcare workers early in the pandemic. Indeed, if true, that would be a noble lie, and we can all understand why some might forgive him. But surely, we can also understand why many Americans would start to distrust him, as well? A leader in a national crisis has to speak to all Americans and lies make that impossible. An easy solution would be to resign and pass the baton to someone with a fresh reputation.
Quote: Fauci has spread the notion that he is untouchable, going so far as to tell MSNBC that an attack on him is an attack on science: “It’s very dangerous … because a lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science, because all of the things that I have spoken about consistently from the very beginning, have been fundamentally based on science.” Throughout the pandemic, “trusting the science” has become a cultural statement and propaganda tool, but one that’s far from what true science is all about.
Quote: Fauci orchestrated the disastrous American response to the COVID crisis with the U.S. racking up 20% of the world’s COVID deaths despite having only 4.2% of the global population. But, that wasn’t when he lied. The meta-lie is the idea that Fauci was initially deceitful about masking, but later told the truth. That is also a lie. The truth is that Fauci was initially honest about masking, and later, and to this date, lied about the evidence.
We are pro-vaccine but
Quote: I think the discussion we just had about the pediatric vaccine is actually quite pro-vaccine.
Quote: We doctors are pro-vaccine.
Quote: I’m pro-vaccine but…
Quote: We’re pro-vaccine but…
