(LifeSiteNews) — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis defended his state’s decision to recommend against vaccinating healthy children with the experimental COVID-19 injections.
Stating that the “burden of proof” is “on the people that say you should get a 5-year-old kid vaccinated” against COVID-19, DeSantis stood by his Surgeon General’s March 8 announcement by reiterating that the risks of vaccinating children against the highly survivable coronavirus may outweigh the benefits, and therefore the state of Florida is not recommending the injection of healthy kids.
Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo “is leading on this,” DeSantis told reporters on Wednesday.
“And I think his view — and I agree with it — is the burden of proof is on the people that say you should get a 5-year-old kid vaccinated for COVID, OK? And they have to carry that burden. It’s not the burden for a parent to … prove why you shouldn’t do it. And if you look at the clinical trial, for example, with the Pfizer [shot] for the 5- to 11-[year-olds], there was no severe COVID in the vaccine arm, but there was also a no severe COVID in the placebo arm,” the governor outlined.
“What he wanted to do was just say, ‘Hey, here’s the recommendation, you’re free to do what you want as a parent.’ But I think a lot of parents were feeling pressured to do it, even though they didn’t necessarily think that was the right thing to do. And so in Florida, we’re a free state, you can make those decisions,” added DeSantis, mentioning that parents of healthy kids are free to get them vaccinated, but are not being recommended to do so.
Florida has become a hero to many liberty-oriented American’s due to their relaxed approach to the so-called COVID-19 pandemic. While many jurisdictions across America and the world implemented vaccine passports, DeSantis preemptively outlawed the measure in his state.
Florida has also outlawed mandating masks in public schools, and put an early end to mandatory masking policies, enforced capacity limits, and other freedom-restricting COVID-era mandates.
Florida’s approach, while heavily criticized by the mainstream media and political establishment, has been in line with many experts and a growing body of recent scientific data.
The massive push by other governments to vaccinate young children has come despite the fact that children face extremely low risk from COVID-19. This combined with the thousands of reports of serious adverse events and deaths after the jabs has led numerous scientists and doctors to criticize the push to inject children with the experimental shots.
In an October 2021 article for the Brownstone Institute, Dr. Paul Elias Alexander, who served in the Department of Health and Human Services during the COVID-19 pandemic under the Trump administration, called the push to vaccinate young children “dangerous” and “absolutely reckless.”
“The risk-benefit discussion for children with these Covid-19 injections is a very different one than that for adults,” Dr. Alexander said. “The fact is that this is a completely novel and experimental injection therapy with no medium or long-term safety data (or even definitive effectiveness data). If we move forward with the vaccination of our children without the proper safety testing, then we will present them with potentially catastrophic risk, including deaths in some.”
Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch has even gone as far to say that if one has to choose between vaccinating their children or pulling them out of school, he recommends they pull their kids out of school.
“Honestly, I would organize with other parents to take them out of the school and create homeschooling environments,” Risch said. “There’s no choice. Your child’s life is on the line.”
While stating that COVID-19 vaccination “is not a high risk that’s going to kill every child,” Risch said the danger posed by the shots is “enough of a risk, that on the average the benefit is higher for homeschooling than it is for vaccination and being in school.”