In a crowded field, can there have been a worse decision than that taken by the CMOs (Chief Medical Officers) in September 2021 to override the JCVI’s advice and authorise the vaccination of children?
The four CMOs involved were: for England Prof. Christopher Whitty; Northern Ireland, Sir Michael McBride; Scotland, Dr. Gregor Smith; and for Wales, Dr. Frank Atherton. I wonder if they still stand by their decision?
A new Oxford University paper, which with the approval of NHS England used the OpenSAFELY-TPP database to study the effect of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine on over one million children aged 5-15. The report allows us to evaluate this decision.
The propaganda at the time was to “trust the science” and by implication, “trust the scientists”. The truth was that, as with so much else during the pandemic, the science and the scientists shouldn’t have been trusted.
The Oxford report matched large groups of children in terms of location, ethnicity and socio-economic and health factors, and then looked at the various health outcomes.
The good news is that there were zero Covid deaths in any of the groups studied. No unvaccinated kids died of Covid nor did any vaccinated kids. So, whatever it was, vaccination wasn’t a life saver.
I would encourage readers to look at the paper. It’s fairly dense but does include a few digestible charts, I’ve reproduced three of them below. The top chart shows that after 20 weeks just as many vaccinated as unvaccinated adolescents had tested positive for Covid. Vaccination did nothing to prevent infection.
There may be confounding factors (such as background health conditions that the researchers haven’t accounted for) but it would seem that for every 20,000 adolescents vaccinated, one of them avoided a Covid related visit to A&E. Two vaccinated kids per 10,000 vaccinated paid a Covid related visit to A&E compared to 2.5 unvaccinated kids per 10,000.
While four unvaccinated kids in 10,000 had a Covid related stay in hospital, only three vaccinated kids per 10,000 were detained in hospital. In other words, one hospital stay per 10,000 vaccinated kids was avoided. It’s perhaps worth noting, though not covered in the report, that at various stages during the ‘pandemic’, the majority of Covid hospital admissions were of people who were already a patient at the hospital, they simply went from a non-Covid ward to a Covid ward.
So, those were the benefits. What about the price we paid to avoid the 1 in 20,000 A&E visit and the 1 in 10,000 hospital stay?
Of the vaccinated kids, nine contracted myocarditis or pericarditis severe enough to visit the hospital. This worked out at about one in 25,000 of the children vaccinated. Of course, we don’t know how many of the vaccinated children contracted myocarditis or pericarditis but didn’t seek hospital assistance and we don’t know the long-term consequences, if any, for sub-clinical instances of myocarditis and pericarditis.
Of the unvaccinated, no cases of myocarditis or pericarditis were recorded.
Broadly speaking, for each child that was spared a visit to the hospital due to Covid another sought treatment for heart damage! Which would you have preferred your child to suffer?
Apart from the cases of myocarditis and pericarditis, let’s see if we can identify some other downsides to the decision of Chris Whitty and his mates to rollout vaccines to children.
Perhaps the easiest to identify are the financial costs. According to an NAO (National Audit Office) report, we spent on average £64 per vaccine dose delivered. This means that to prevent one additional visit to A&E we had to spent £1,280,000 of taxpayer’s money.
To prevent the one additional Covid hospitalisation the taxpayer coughed up £640,000. Remember, this wasn’t to save a life – there were no deaths among the vaccinated or unvaccinated. No, this money was spent just to prevent a single hospital visit or a single hospital stay.
Was this really a good use of taxpayer’s money? Millions of vaccine doses delivered at £64 a jab. If we were determined to spend this money, money which we had to borrow, can there have been a less effective type of health expenditure that we could have blown it on?
There were other downsides. I suspect some readers of the Daily Sceptic will be as sceptical of other vaccines as they are of Covid ones, but for those, like Chris Whitty, who value them, surely they must see that the coercive approach, lack of efficacy and high level of adverse events have led to a far higher level of vaccine hesitancy in the population.
I’m sure we all know of families torn apart by the vaccine controversy. In my own social circle there are parents who’ve endured terrible family ruptures with their children when their children have fallen for the great Covid vaccine scam.
I suspect an under-appreciated cost of the rollout to kids has been the undermining of parental authority. Did the encouragement of schools to allow kids to ignore parental objections to vaccination pave the way for the general presumption of ‘Gillick competency’ for children, resulting in the recent explosion in kids switching gender at school without the school seeking parental permission?
This pernicious undermining of parental authority and the primacy of children’s ‘wants’ also feeds into Labour’s argument for the voting age to be lowered to 16. If a child of 12 can override her (or his) parents with regard to health treatment and gender surely it follows that by the time she is 16 she is mature enough to vote.
The decision of Whitty and Co. to approve the vaccine rollout to children led to no discernable benefit to the children involved or society at large. The costs were astronomical both financially and perhaps more importantly to the role of children in society and to the family. I doubt it will ever happen but at some point I think Whitty should be required to justify himself.
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