WASHINGTON, D.C., (LifeSiteNews) – The Biden administration is ramping up a campaign to get as many experimental COVID-19 vaccines as possible into the arms of American kids, amid disputed fears of the coronavirus Delta variant.
The White House has enlisted at least 50 social media personalities to push the vaccines to audiences of tens of millions of children and adolescents on YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch, the New York Times reported this week.
“There is a massive need to grow awareness within the 12-18 age range,” read an email sent in June on behalf of the Biden White House to a TikTok creator with over 10 million fans.
The administration is reportedly using marketing techniques from the 2020 presidential campaign to push vaccination to kids. White House officials even gave off-the-record briefings on COVID-19 vaccines to top influencers in June.
Vaccine-related content by social media partners of the Biden administration often involves live videos with the highly-controversial Dr. Anthony Fauci and emphasizing to young people that they will face fewer restrictions if vaccinated.
State and local governments have also started promoting vaccines online. A recent $16.4 million contract awarded by the state of Colorado, for example, features a scheme to give popular social media users up to $1,000 per month to advertise vaccination to their fans. Several other jurisdictions, including New Jersey and San Jose, California, are moving forward with similar projects, according to the New York Times’ report.
Along with social media personalities, the White House has tapped schools and pharmacies to get more children vaccinated, as President Joe Biden said in a speech last Thursday on “next steps” to “combat the spread of the Delta variant.”
“So, we’ve funded safety measures at schools, we’ve vaccinated teachers and staff, and we can mask up our kids for further protection,” he said. “But once again, there’s one more thing we need to do: Get more adolescents, ages 12 and up, vaccinated now that they’ve been cleared.”
Biden urged school districts to host pop-up vaccine clinics for students and announced that pharmacies participating in the Federal Retail Pharmacy Program are being directed to work with schools to increase child vaccinations. He goaded parents to “get your children vaccinated.”
Last month, Biden claimed in a CNN town hall that emergency authorization for COVID-19 vaccines would “soon” be extended to children younger than 12. “They are doing the examinations now, the testing now, and making the decision now,” he said.
He failed to mention, however, that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) linked Pfizer’s and Moderna’s COVID-19 shots to heart inflammation in June, after receiving hundreds of reports of cases in people under 30. Reports of heart inflammation in young patients have nearly tripled since then, the CDC revealed last week.
COVID-19 vaccines have been tied to other conditions as well, like Guillain-Barré syndrome and blood disorders, and have been credited with enhancing the risk of stronger variants.
Biden has also neglected the fact that children, who do not effectively spread COVID-19, have a virtually zero percent death rate from the virus. Of the more than 4.1 million minors in the U.S. who have tested positive for coronavirus, a total of 358 have died as of July 29, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Several states have reported no virus deaths in children at all.
Media champions ‘self-consent’ for child vaccinations
Liberal media outlets in recent weeks blazed the trail when it came to pushing COVID-19 vaccine injections for children, often regardless of parental consent.
An article last month by Time magazine promoted VaxTeen – a group founded by a teenager to push the HPV vaccine – which helps adolescents get vaccinated against their parents’ will. The VaxTeen website includes links to clinics and information about consent requirements, and the founder has personally aided minors in getting around their parents, Time said.
The New York Times likewise ran an article in June highlighting “many teenagers eager to get shots that they see as unlocking freedoms.” “As the pandemic ebbs, some teen social circles are reconstituting based on vaccination status,” the newspaper said. “Increasingly, frustrated teenagers are searching for ways to be vaccinated without their parents’ consent.”
The Times detailed stories of minors denied the experimental vaccines, like that of a girl in Washington who “teared up” when she realized that she wouldn’t be able to get vaccinated at school without her parents’ permission, before later sneaking out and doing so anyway. Another teenager got the vaccine on her 18th birthday as a “birthday gift to herself.”
The article “all but lionized teenagers who live in states that do not require parental consent for vaccines,” former Times journalist Alex Berenson commented.
Similar stories have proliferated across mainstream media. “There’s been a surge of teens using the internet to defy their guardians and protect themselves against the virus,” Business Insider celebrated last month.
A recent interview by the New Yorker championed an Arizona teenager who complained to the magazine’s editor about missing a “sort of a video-game tournament” because of his parents’ opposition to COVID-19 vaccines.
“That’s when I realized that this is pretty important, and I’m starting to get left out of life,” he said.
And in May, NBC News published an article about a man who went viral online for getting vaccinated despite his mother’s objections, and featured a university health sciences dean who urged teenagers to “advocate for their own decision-making to be vaccinated if they wish.”
41 states mandate parental consent for vaccinations for minors below 18, but four other states – Alabama, Oregon, Rhode Island, and South Carolina – allow adolescents to “self-consent” between ages of 14 and 16, and another five let healthcare providers waive consent requirements. A law approved last year in Washington, D.C., that is currently the subject of multiple lawsuits authorizes children as young as 11 to consent to vaccines.
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