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 Jill Biden, Twitter

MCLEAN, Virginia (LifeSiteNews) — First Lady Jill Biden is traveling the country to encourage Americans to vaccinate their children against COVID-19, starting her initiative Monday at Virginia’s Franklin Sherman Elementary School, where the first polio vaccine was administered in 1954.

“The vaccine is the best way to protect your children against COVID-19. It’s been thoroughly reviewed and rigorously tested, it’s safe, it’s free, and it’s available for every child in this country, 5 and up,” Mrs. Biden said, ABC News reports. “From the day you held your sweet, fragile, little baby, you have made the choice, again and again, to keep your child safe. Giving your child the COVID-19 vaccine is your choice too. So, make the decision to protect your children with the same vaccine that has already saved millions of lives.”

Joining the First Lady on stage was a sixth grader named Everett Munson, who said he was “excited to be vaccinated because now I’ll be able to visit my cousins and grandfather,” and go “places without worrying that I could get COVID and give it to my family, friends or teachers.” The boy also suggested an incentive: “Everyone should get ice cream after their shots.”

The Biden administration is also urging school districts to distribute materials promoting the COVID vaccines to children and their parents, as well as “set up school-located vaccine clinics” using federal COVID aid dollars.

The campaign follows the U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) October 29 decision to approve administering reduced doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine to children between the ages of five and eleven, a move which raised concerns thanks in large part to Dr. Eric Rubin, a member of the FDA’s Vaccines & Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, 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.”

Significant reservations persist among many Americans about the COVID vaccines for adults and children alike, stemming from the fact that they were developed and released far faster than any previous vaccine. Those concerns are even more intense regarding the vaccination of children, a prospect with limited safety data and an all-but-nonexistent need.

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 Events 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.

Further, a growing body of data indicates that the mass vaccination strategy for defeating COVID-19 has failed, thereby undermining the rationale for mandates. The federal government considers more than 193 million Americans (58% of the eligible) to be “fully vaccinated,” yet ABC News reported last month that more Americans died of COVID-19 this year (353,000) than in all of 2020 (352,000), according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

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.”

Last week, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced legislation to ban COVID vaccine mandates for children, and COVID vaccines for minors without parental consent.

LifeSiteNews has produced an extensive COVID-19 vaccines resources page. View it here.