(LifeSiteNews) — As the Biden administration prepares to roll out COVID-19 shots for children age 5-11 pending FDA approval, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Rochelle Walensky said children should still be required to wear masks at school.
Speaking at a White House COVID-19 briefing Wednesday, Walensky said the CDC “will look forward to scaling out pediatric vaccination” in the coming weeks, and schools should continue to enforce their mask mandates even after the FDA approves the shots for children.
“It will take some time, and as I just noted, as we head into these winter months we know we cannot be complacent,” Walensky said. “Right now, we are going to continue to recommend masks in all schools for all people in those schools and we will look forward to scaling out pediatric vaccination during this period of time.”
CDC director Rochelle Walensky says agency will still recommend masks in schools when vaccines for children ages 5-11 are authorized pic.twitter.com/NGSclIFkPx
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) October 20, 2021
The CDC director argued that mandating masks for children — who face extremely low risk of contracting serious illness from COVID-19 — causes a significant reduction in the likelihood of a coronavirus school outbreak.
“We also know that from previous data that schools that have had masks in place were 3 1/2 times less likely to have school outbreaks requiring school closure,” Walensky said, citing a recent study out of Arizona comparing schools in Maricopa and Pima counties that required masks and those that did not.
The CDC analysis of the study concluded that “[t]he odds of a school-associated COVID-19 outbreak in schools with no mask requirement were 3.7 times higher than those in schools with an early mask requirement.”
It is unclear whether the study actually shows a causal relationship between mandates and a reduced risk of serious COVID-19 outbreaks.
Dr. Vinay Prasad, MD, MPH, a hematologist-oncologist and associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, argued that the Arizona study does not establish a causal relationship between mandated masking and a significant reduction in the spread of the coronavirus.
“The endpoint of the study were not cases attributable to school spread, but rather the number of schools with two or more cases,” Prasad said. “This weighs equally a school with four cases vs. 400 cases.”
Prasad also noted that there were “many important variables the paper did not adjust for,” such as testing rates, whether asymptomatic students were tested, what kind of masks were used, and overall compliance with the mandates.
“Strangely, the paper does not report the raw numbers of kids, teachers, and staff with covid19 infection thought attributable to school spread,” Prasad added, noting that the reported 3.5% increase in outbreaks in schools with no mask mandate “seems large, given that the cluster RCT [Randomized Controlled Trial] of Bangladesh showed no effect for cloth masks in primary analysis, and a modest effect size for surgical masks.”
Citing a likelihood of residual confounding factors, Prasad concluded the Arizona study “ is ill-suited for causal claims.”
As school districts across the country announce plans to require all eligible children to get the jab as a prerequisite to attend in-person classes, experts have raised the alarm about the alleged necessity and potential risks of vaccinating children, who face extremely low risk of serious harm from COVID-19.
It's official: Joe Biden has announced that his Administration will be forcing COVID vaccinations on nearly 1/3rd of American citizens, blatantly disregarding the personal objections of millions of people and moving America ever closer towards a medical dictatorship.
We cannot stand for this unprecedented overreach, and we will not submit to Biden's tyrannical public coercion efforts.
Please SIGN this urgent petition informing the President that you will NOT comply with these unconstitutional vaccine mandate orders issued by the Biden Administration, and that elected officials should act in their capacity to block these intrusive demands.
On Thursday, September 9th, Joe Biden announced the latest round of federal orders meant to further coerce large swaths of the public into getting the COVID vaccine -- many against their will.
While the legal standing of these measures is, at best, dubious, the Biden Administration appears more ready than ever to gut our individual rights and practically erase medical autonomy in our country.
This latest escalation in overreach was announced via a televised speech in which Biden outlined a new "six-point plan" that includes far more than just six avenues to achieve mass medical compliance.
Among the most egregious new federal mandates are the following:
- A requirement that all private businesses employing more than 100 people mandate their workers get the Covid-19 vaccine or submit to weekly testing (to be implemented by way of a new Department of Labor rule)
- A requirement that all federal employees and federal contractors get the COVID vaccine
- A requirement that all healthcare workers in facilities that receive reimbursement from Medicare and/or Medicaid (an estimated 17 million) get the Covid-19 vaccine without an alternative testing option
- A requirement that all Head Start teachers get the COVID vaccine
- A federal effort to lobby states to implement vaccine mandates for all school employees, and require regular testing of all students and school staff
- A federal effort to lobby entertainment venues to require proof of vaccination or testing in order to grant entry to the public
- A continuation of mask mandates on all federal properties and during interstate travel (i.e. planes, trains, buses)
All in all, these new vaccine mandates, which will go into effect within the coming weeks, will affect an estimated 100 million American workers -- 2/3rds of the entire workforce!
And, according to an administration official, violations of these unconstitutional requirements could result in fines of up to $14,000.
While this is clearly a political ploy on the part of the Joe Biden and his team of power-hungry Washington insiders to shift the focus from their disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the American public knows better: After nearly a year and a half's worth of arbitrary, ever-changing, and unconstitutional government mandates in response to the COVID outbreak, it was always a given that the Biden Administration would ramp things up even further when it behooved them.
And now, it would seem that time has officially come.
"This is not about freedom or personal choice," Biden uttered in his remarks, confirming his administration's blatant dismissal of all Americans' right(s) to accept or decline the experimental Covid-19 vaccine.
This is a stunning reversal from Biden's declaration last December that "I don’t think [the vaccine] should be mandatory, I wouldn’t demand it to be mandatory."
In fact, Biden even confirmed his intention to flout states' rights in the process, warning that "If these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way."
These are not the words of an "empathetic" leader; these are the words of an aspiring dictator. And, for the time being, the only way to stop Joe Biden's tyranny is through mass noncompliance.
As we've said from the beginning, science, basic logic, and common sense should dictate policy regarding COVID and the Delta variant.
But Joe Biden and the federal government have long abandoned those principles throughout this crisis, culminating into this disturbing yet inevitable flurry of intrusive vaccine mandates that use people's jobs, individual autonomy, and livelihood as leverage.
This assault on our individual rights, private businesses, and American workers cannot be tolerated, and the easiest way to combat these unlawful orders is to just say NO.
Please SIGN and SHARE this most important petition letting Joe Biden know that you will NOT comply with the unconstitutional medical demands being made by this administration, and that action should be taken to block any intrusive action against working Americans and private employers.
Thank you!
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
'Biden announces vaccine requirements for private businesses, impacting tens of millions of Americans': https://www.
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which supports mass vaccination, “nearly 6.2 million children have tested positive for COVID-19 since the onset of the pandemic,” as of October 14.
The AAP counted at least 558 deaths attributed to COVID-19 among children, based on data from 49 states and Puerto Rico.
With an overall rate of infection for kids working out to “8,208 cases per 100,000 children in the population,” the AAP concluded that “[a]t this time, it appears that severe illness due to COVID-19 is uncommon among children.”
In an October 20 article for the Brownstone Institute, epidemiologist Dr. Paul Elias Alexander noted that the risk to children from COVID-19 is roughly even with their risk from the seasonal flu, arguing that vaccinating kids against the coronavirus is “absolutely reckless” and “dangerous.”
“Regulators: please slow down and demand safety testing, no matter how long it takes,” Alexander said, urging oversight bodies to perform “proper risk-benefit analyses and see that the injections are contraindicated in children.”
“Particular care is needed with regard to the potential widespread injection of children before there are any real data on the safety or effectiveness of these injections,” Alexander said.
Concern runs high that the risks of vaccination in children are higher than the risks from the virus itself, and that health problems will emerge over time once large numbers of children are injected with the experimental drug.
A September 20 safety report published by the Federal Institute for Vaccines and Biomedicines in Germany found that the number of reported cases of suspected adverse effects after COVID-19 vaccination in children age 12 to 17 has already exceeded the total number of COVID-related hospitalizations for children within the same age group since the beginning of the pandemic.
Studies published after the jabs were authorized for teenagers have shown that young people, especially teenage boys, are at serious risk of developing severe side effects to the experimental COVID-19 drugs, including heart inflammation.
In June, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna were forced to add a risk of heart inflammation to the fact sheets for their COVID-19 drugs after roughly 1,200 cases of heart inflammation following vaccination — mostly in males under age 30 — were reported to the government.
Likewise, a University of California-led study published in September found that for certain young men, the risk of heart inflammation after getting a COVID shot was four to six times as high as their risk of being hospitalized with COVID-19.
Meanwhile, although a briefing document on COVID-19 shots for 5–11-year-olds released to the CDC by Pfizer and BioNTech on Friday found “[n]o new safety problems” or “cases of heart inflammation,” NPR acknowledged that “only a few thousand children were included in the research, so that sort of rare problem wouldn’t necessarily be detected.”
As the Biden administration ramps up efforts to vaccinate young children, mainstream media outlets and prominent public health figures like Walensky and White House COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci have routinely ginned up anxiety about pediatric COVID cases.
The focus on increasing public worry about COVID-19 in children led recently to a gross overestimation of juvenile coronavirus hospitalizations by The New York Times.
Earlier this month, The New York Times said it “misstated the number of hospitalizations in U.S. children” after it ran a story claiming that 900,000 children had been hospitalized with the coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic.
“It is more than 63,000 from August 2020 to October 2021, not 900,000 since the beginning of the pandemic,” the paper admitted.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is set to consider approving COVID-19 injections for 5-11 year-olds on Tuesday.