We’re publishing an original piece today by a senior pharmaceutical company executive setting out the ethical case against vaccinating healthy 12-15 year-olds against SARS-CoV-2. He points out that the risk of myocarditis alone is greater than any potential benefit of being vaccinated for this cohort. There are 3,200,000 12-15 year-olds in the U.K. and if you give a single dose of the vaccine to every one, according to the JCVI, you’re likely to prevent seven children ending up in the paediatric ICU. That’s not seven per million; that’s seven in total. But, according to the same source, the risk of a 12-15 year-old who’s received one dose developing myocarditis is 3-17 per million, so if every child in this cohort receives one dose between 9-54 will develop vaccine-induced myocarditis. Since we don’t know the long-term impact of myocarditis on a person’s health, this data suggests the risk of vaccinating 12-15 year-olds outweighs the risk – and that’s to ignore all the other potential side effects of the Covid vaccines.
Here are two key paragraphs, although the whole piece is excellent:
When it comes to the vaccine-induced safety risks, such as myocarditis, we do not have enough data to adequately assess what they mean for this vulnerable group and, as a result, we do not know how to satisfactorily manage them. This was the point the JCVI was making when raising concerns about the long-term risks. I must also emphasise again; children are not small adults and for 12-15 year-olds with hormones racing and puberty in full swing we cannot necessarily transfer any knowledge or assessment of risks from the adult population to this group. It may be that the risks are short-term, manageable, and acceptable and so the balance of benefit/risk is okay… but the fact is we simply do not know, and finding out by immunising 100,000s of children in uncontrolled circumstances is no way to discover the truth. One cannot ignore these risks just because “they are very rare”, especially when the significant benefits may also be “very rare”.
This is a clear case of where the precautionary principle should be applied and where we should assume the worse outcomes and manage the situation accordingly. Here, we’d assume there will be long-term issues associated with vaccine-induced myocarditis, put in place a routine monitoring plan for those who have already suffered this adverse event to ensure they remain healthy and detect any issues as soon as we can, and not vaccinate anyone else in this group until we understand what, if any, long-term issues there may be. It is ironic to me that the precautionary principle has been wielded by the Government and their advisors to justify a whole host of unproven interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic (think masks, think lockdown), but it appears that when it gets in the way of a desired policy implementation it is something that can just be forgotten. As Groucho Marx once said: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Professor David Paton has come at the same issue from a different angle and reached the same conclusion. He’s examined the argument that vaccinating healthy 12-15 year-olds will reduce the disruption to children’s education in the Spectator and concluded that it’s nonsense. He originally set out this critique in a Twitter thread and that prompted Julia Hartley-Brewer to have him on her show to flesh out the argument. You can see a clip here.
