WASHINGTON (LifeSiteNews) — The U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) gave its approval Friday to administering Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine to children between the ages of five and eleven, despite limited safety data and an all-but-nonexistent need.
The Associated Press reports that the FDA has given emergency-use approval to reduced doses for children, a third of the size administered to teens and adults. Final recommendations by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) are slated for next Tuesday, and child vaccinations could be underway by the end of next week.
Pfizer already plans to “begin shipping millions of vials of the pediatric vaccine — in orange caps to avoid mix-ups with the purple-capped doses for everyone else,” per the AP.
The news comes just days after child doses won the endorsement of the FDA’s Vaccines & Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, which raised eyebrows in large part thanks to one of the board members, Dr. Eric Rubin of Harvard, stating that “we’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes.”
That comment fed into many Americans’ deep reservations about the COVID vaccines’ safety — fears the Biden administration has done little to allay, preferring coercion and shaming to transparency and persuasion.
Safety concerns over the COVID vaccines stem primarily from the fact that they were developed and released far faster than any previous vaccine. Defenders stress that their development did not start from scratch, but rather relied on years of prior research into mRNA technology; and that one of the innovations of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed was conducting various aspects of the development process concurrently rather than sequentially, eliminating delays unrelated to safety. However, those factors do not fully account for the condensing of clinical trial phases — each of which can take anywhere from 1–3 years on their own — to just three months apiece.
While cases of severe harm reported to the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) after taking COVID shots represent less than one percent of total doses administered in the United States, a 2010 report submitted to the US Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) warned that VAERS caught “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events.” May reporting from NBC News quotes several mainstream experts acknowledging “gaps” in federal vaccine monitoring.
With regard to COVID and children, data shows they are at little-to-no risk from the virus itself, while even experts otherwise friendly to the new shots — as acknowledged in July by the left-leaning publication Wired — argue that the potential for vaccine-related myocarditis among young males undermines the public health establishment’s persistent refrain that “the benefits of [COVID-19] vaccination far outweigh any harm.”
This summer, a team of researchers with Johns Hopkins School of Medicine “analyze[d] approximately 48,000 children under 18 diagnosed with Covid in health-insurance data from April to August 2020,” and found a “mortality rate of zero among children without a pre-existing medical condition such as leukemia.” The lead researcher, Dr. Marty Makary, accused the CDC of basing its advocacy of school COVID vaccination on “flimsy data.”
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