Manic Street Vaccinators
The Challenge of Parenthood during a Global Panic
With the FDA set to imminently extend their emergency use authorisation of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccination to those aged 12-15 years of age and the company already requesting a similar extension for those aged from 2-11 years of age, parents around the world will soon be asked to consent to having their children receive a medical product which, let’s be clear, is still in clinical trials and still unapproved.
For many parents, it will be a simple decision. Virus = bad, Vaccine = good. But, let’s pretend the decision deserves more thought than that and consider some of the reasons you might allow your child to receive this vaccination.
The Threat of Covid
It is perhaps unsurprising that after a year of nonstop scaremongering from our media there are many parents who genuinely feel as if their child is in mortal danger from Covid-19. They are, thus, somewhat aggrieved that their children do not yet have access to the miracle vaccine and are very keen that they get it as soon as possible.
Let’s clear this one up quickly as it’s an easy one. The risk to Covid to anyone under 18 is tiny. See below chart from the American Council on Science and Health.
A risk of death between 0.001% and 0.003% is statistically non-existent. This is borne out in the actual numbers. The CDC registered just 277 Covid-19 deaths for the whole pandemic so far (14 months) in the US among those aged 0-17 years.1 Bear in mind, this will include all children sadly dying of other serious ailments like cancer who happened to test positive for SARS-CoV-II in the preceding weeks or whose terminal conditions were worsened but not caused by Covid. In a population of over 330m, these numbers are infinitesimally small no matter how tragic each one is. The country, as a whole, wouldn’t even think about the issue at all had it not been front page news for the last year and a half.
For perspective, the CDC registered 434 deaths from influenza among that same age category in the 2019/20 flu season,2 477 for 2018/19,3 and 643 for 2017/184 (12 months periods) and that is with a fully approved flu vaccine available. Flu is, thus, significantly more dangerous to children than Covid-19 and, more to the point, none of the years with significantly more flu deaths among children constituted an emergency. It barely constituted a footnote. More children drown every year in the US than from either Covid or flu.5 Many multiples more die in road traffic accidents6 or tragically take their own lives.7 The life of a parent is often one of worries but Covid shouldn’t be one of them. There’s plenty of other things more deserving of your attention.
Still, as tiny as the risk of Covid is to your child you still might not want to take any chances. That is understandable but administering a brand new type of vaccine technology that is unapproved and still in clinical trials and which has been linked to over 3,500 deaths8 so far in the US alone (1,600+ of them Pfizer specifically) does not constitute “not taking any chances”. More so when you realise that the trial Pfizer completed in order to have their emergency use authorisation extended to 12-15 year olds had only 2,260 participants.9 With half receiving the placebo, only a little over 1,000 children will have received the shot. Does a thousand children sound like enough to unearth rare side effects in a product that will be administered to tens of millions? Consider for a moment that the main Johnson & Johnson vaccine trail enlisted over 60,000 participants10 and yet it failed to pick up the issue of severe blood clots that led to the vaccine being suspended by the FDA and the CDC after it had received emergency use authorisation for the general public. As it happens, those blood clots exclusively affected women so far as we know. With only 2,260 participants, Pfizer’s children’s trial will have given the shot to just over 500 young girls. How confident could you possibly be allowing your daughter to take such a vaccine?
Now, if we were dealing with an actual emergency maybe, as a parent, you would have to make a difficult decision and decide that, despite the relative lack of certainty around the vaccine, it is worth giving to your child in order to ward off a greater threat. Certainly, some parents have to make such decisions when their child is diagnosed with terminal cancer and the only course of action left to them is to try a new, experimental drug or treatment that has not been fully safety-tested but offers the only chance for a child certain to die of their disease otherwise. However, as explained above, Covid-19 represents nothing like such a threat. There simply is no emergency for children and so no justification for emergency-use vaccines.
Extortion
I came across the below tweet in response to Dr. Vinay Prasad making much the same point as I have made above. This woman recognises that her child is at no risk from Covid-19 but will nevertheless have her vaccinated in order to facilitate the reopening of schools.
Those of us in marginally more sane areas may forget that there are places in the world that have never reopened schools since the pandemic started back in March 2020. Such places are largely concentrated in Gavin Newsom’s California where public school children have been denied in-person education for over a year. Such wanton disregard for children, perhaps, makes it easier to understand the desperation of many parents as demonstrated in the above tweet. If your child can only go back to school if they are vaccinated then many parents might see the risk as a price worth paying for a return to normality.
But, this is nothing more than a bully attempting to extort an outcome from you. You don’t give the bully your lunch money because he says he’ll torment you otherwise. You give him a bloody nose (literally or figuratively - life is complicated) and go back about your business. The bully in this scenario is mostly the school unions and we can, perhaps, be a little understanding of them as, like most bullies, they themselves have been bullied - in this case by a fear-mongering media and a power-hungry government. However, your understanding need only go so far and should not extend to the point where it compromises your role as your child’s guardian. No matter how hard the circumstances, you don’t barter with your child’s health.
Dereliction of Duty
I also came across this response to the news of Pfizer’s impending rollout of their vaccine to young people. The tweet is somewhat redeemed by the recognition of the low risk from Covid and the rejection of mandatory enforcement but deciding to allow your child to take an unapproved vaccine for a virus you accept has minimal risk because she “desperately wants it” is particularly stupid.
Parenting is hard but, ultimately, it boils down to just two things.
Protect your children (even from themselves).
Help them to become independent so that, as adults, they will no longer need your protection or your help.
Those are my duties towards my children, as I see them. Everything after that - being “nice” to them, being their friend, being liked by them - is fine but I don’t let any of it get in the way of those two duties. And, here, number 1 applies. I’m the parent - it’s my job to evaluate the issue and protect my children as best I can regardless of what they may “desperately want”. They are the child - they can have input but ultimately they need me to do this for them because they can’t do it for themselves even if they think they can. If they could, they’d have the right to do it and I wouldn’t be needed. They may, perhaps, not like me for it but parenting isn’t Twitter - it’s not about “likes”, it’s about doing what’s best for your child.
The ‘Herd’
The above tweet also references “the herd”. Back in a pre-vaccine Covid world, any mention of herd immunity was met with howls of anger either because it was a disrespectful term (what, are we cattle?) or because such a thing was said not to exist. Now, with vaccines, it is suddenly en vogue again and we’re all morally obliged to vaccinate our children in order to achieve it. Go figure.
As someone who doesn’t wear a mask and won’t be taking a vaccine and who definitely will not allow his children to be vaccinated, I am often accused of being selfish. That is, I have no consideration for the rest of society.
I, of course, disagree and will always do what I can to help others and contribute to the common good as best I can. I just happen to think that masks are useless and the vaccines are both riskier and less effective than is commonly accepted and the threat of the virus is grossly overstated anyway. But, all of that aside, as a parent, I understand my responsibility to my children to be far greater than any responsibility I have to wider society. My children are my duty - I am morally obliged to care for them as best I can in a way that completely dwarfs any moral obligation to society. Again, I will contribute to society as best I can but not at the expense of my children. They come first - absolutely and totally. Thus, any appeal to giving my children an experimental drug that poses them no direct benefit in order to contribute to the ‘common good’ falls on deaf ears. I’m a parent - I know my duty.
If you tolerate this…
It is good that we have vaccines because there are an awful lot of very frightened people who need them to feel safe again. Up to now, children have had to pay an incredibly heavy price in an attempt to make those people feel unafraid without the vaccines. They lost their school, they lost their activities, they lost their friends, they lost their extended family. They lost their routine. They lost their entire sense of how the world works just as they were learning that very thing. And, as above, none of this was for their benefit - it was for the sake of adults who were afraid.
The placing of this burden, which doesn’t belong to them, onto our children is a complete inversion of normal social mores which have always sought to prioritise the welfare of the young. That we are not constantly and repeatedly ashamed of this is a sad indictment of where we are morally as a global community of people.
However, now we find ourselves in a position where, instead of apologising to our children, we are set to ask them to take on another, potentially far greater, burden. We are asking them to take a brand new type of vaccine technology that is unapproved, is authorised for emergency-use only, and is still in clinical trials - all for a disease that doesn’t affect them. And we are doing that because adults are still afraid despite everything those children have already given them.
Well, it’s time to stop being afraid. Adults have the vaccines if they want them. The children have already shouldered far more of the burden of this global panic than was ever remotely decent. Pressuring them to bear more is unfair and it is up to parents to protect their children from such unfair pressures.
Because who else is there?
***Updated 13th August 2021***
Since writing the above in May, there are several things that can be added. The Emergency Use Authorisation for the vaccines has indeed been extended to the 12-15 years of age category (known as a “Conditional Marketing Authorisation” in the EU). The Health Service Executive (HSE) of Ireland, in its guide to “Deciding on COVID-19 vaccination for 12 to 15 year olds” openly admit that the risk of Covid hospitalising a healthy child is 1 in 100,000, while the risk of myocarditis for young boys (inflamation of the heart) from the vaccine is 1 in 16,000. Despite this clear contraindication, they go ahead and recommend the vaccine for all children 12 and over.
I also had time to look back on the last time our country tried to stem a pandemic by urging young people to take a rushed vaccine. Incredibly, it was the very same Chief Medical Officer, Tony Holohan, who presided over that debacle in 2009 which left scores of children seriously damaged for life by the Pandemrix vaccine. To this day, the court cases are still paying out millions to its victims. Tony Holohan assured parents it was safe. The HSE assured parents it was safe. It was not.
Read about it here in this Twitter thread. It’s remarkable.
And that was a traditional vaccine with multiple studies advocating for its safety. Today, the vaccine they want to inject your child with is a completely new type of technology that seeks to hijack your cells and reprogram them to produce spike protein. We’ve never done anything like this before. And there is one study for the Pfizer vaccine, conducted by Pfizer, that gave the vaccine to about 500 boys in total. Underpowered doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Why would they want to take such risks with our kids? Having made mistakes before, why is the “abundance of caution” that has dominated our lives for the last year and a half not being extended to our children when it comes to them taking an experimental vaccine with no long-term safety data for a disease that poses them no statistical threat? As Ireland’s National Immunisation Advisory Committee (NIAC) make clear in their guidance, the primary goals are “keeping schools open” and “facilitating psychosocial development” and ultimately to aid “the normalisation of life”.11 In other words, they are doing it to combat government restrictions. Health benefits to the children are entirely secondary, as, indeed, they must be, seeing as how Covid poses them no significant health risks in the first place. The vaccine, thus, is not to combat the virus but to combat our hysterical reaction to it. While I agree this overreaction needs to be combatted, risking our kids is not the method I’d choose.
Ultimately, though, this is all just cover for the real motive which is that they’re scared. They’ve always been scared and despite being vaccinated with their miracle drug, they are still scared. And they want the children to protect them. There is a word for people like that.
Cowards.
This is excellent. Aside from the central point about vaccines it is a very clear elucidation of the role of a parent - this clarity is often locking in our rudderless, relativist world. As an interesting aside....you mention the low number of child participants in the Pfizer study. The author of Invisible Women makes the very good point that women are usually under represented in clinical trials with many instances of drugs being approved based on studies that had huge majority of male participants....drugs that turned out to have no effect (or sometimes ill effect) on women. These weren't detected at trial because they were statistically under powered from a female perspective. And clinical trials often don't take account of the huge hormonal changes in women at different stages of their cycles which can affect efficacy/effect of drugs (linked below). Pfizer study is underpowered for kids absolutely and I would say far more so for young girls. People say we don't have any long term data which is true. But we haven't even got short term data. To give it to a child is madness.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csz3r5
This is a sound, no-nonsense factual and philosophical assessment. Thank you.
I, along with hundreds of thousands of others, attended the recent BBC-ignored freedom march in London. There was a woman almost constantly shouting through a megaphone. Of course those with megaphones at such events don't tend to have the most nuanced of views, and much of what she was saying was fairly predictable. But then she paused and her tone shifted: "Now they're coming for our children! That was their biggest mistake!" Real heart-felt conviction. And it got a real heart-felt cheer. I'm not sure it's quite dawned on anyone just how dangerous and divisive administering the new vaccines to children could be, both medically and socially.