Opinion
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(LifeSiteNews) — Since asking Bishop Richard Stika of Knoxville, Tennessee, to revoke his recommendation that minors be vaccinated, the most common objection we have heard is: “What about the hundreds of children who have died from COVID? Shouldn’t we be vaccinating everyone to protect such vulnerable children?” In a recent interview celebrating the emergency-use authorization of the Pfizer vaccine for children as young as 5, Pittsburgh pediatrician Andrew Nowalk made this argument and said, “Hopefully, we’ll be vaccinating a lot of kids by Halloween.”

Before explaining why these vaccinations are bad for our youth, I must first point out that it is unscientific to point to a control group and say, “Look, hundreds of people died! Therefore, we must all take MyPetMedicine to prevent/cure the disease which killed them!” This non sequitur is the purview of snake-oil salesmen, not physicians. I reiterate: There are no double-blind studies published in any peer-reviewed scientific journal which show a superior health outcome for COVID-vaccinated minors vs. unvaccinated.

As of October 1, the CDC reported a total of 478 deaths of minors (0–17 years) “involving COVID.” Over a window of one year (August 2020 to July 2021), the CDC reported 285 minor deaths involving COVID. It must first be noted that “involving COVID” doesn’t mean “exclusively due to COVID” but that COVID may have been a contributing cause of death among other comorbidities. Even if COVID were the primary cause in every one of these 285 cases, we would rank this annualized death rate well behind influenza/pneumonia. In total, about 7.4 million minors have tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, making the raw odds of a child dying from COVID less than 1 in 15,000. Furthermore, most of the children who have died had serious comorbidities; the odds of an otherwise healthy child dying from COVID are virtually nil.

I articulate these numbers to define the problem, not to minimize it. Behind every integer is a grieving family, but there is no evidence that mass vaccination of our youth would have prevented these deaths. Rather, scientific evidence demands the conclusion that a mass youth-vaccination campaign would hurt far more children than it helps.

Recently, public-health expert Dr. Ronald Kostoff assembled an impressive team of researchers to co-author a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Toxicology Reports entitled “Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19?” The team included Dr. Daniela Calina, Head of the Clinical Pharmacy Department of the University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Craiova, Romania; Dr. Panayiotis Vlachoyiannopoulos, Professor of Pathophysiology at the University of Athens Medical School, Dr. Andrey Svistunov, Professor of Pharmacology at the I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University; and Dr. Aristides Tsatsakis, Professor of Toxicology at the University of Crete.

By means of a meta-analysis of American COVID cases, clinical-trial results, and vaccine-related adverse events reported through the federal database VAERS, they concluded that “for children the chances of death from COVID-19 are negligible, but the chances of serious damage over their lifetime from the toxic inoculations are not negligible.” They further opined that the clinical trials were all fundamentally flawed, because they did not track any biomarkers in the participants which would have given early indication of eventual health problems due to the vaccine, such as “d-dimers for evidence of enhanced coagulation/clotting; CRP for evidence of enhanced inflammation; troponins for evidence of cardiac damage” and many more.

(I wryly add that the clinical-trial designers were not unfamiliar with the concept of biomarkers, as they tracked two that were most beneficial to their cause. They tested for antibodies to the scripted spike protein, and they tested for genetic content of the SARs-CoV-2 virus for evidence of infection.)

Despite self-publishing, immunologist J. Bart Classen’s analysis is even more persuasive, because he relied on the clinical-trial data as published in the New England Journal of Medicine, without making any assumptions about over-diagnosis of COVID or under-reporting in VAERS. Using established methodology in the assessment of new drugs, Dr. Classen critically re-analyzed all clinical-trial data for “all-cause morbidity.”

Here’s an example to explain Dr. Classen’s methodology: Suppose a clinical trial involved 10,000 participants who received Medicine X to mitigate Disease X and 10,000 who received a placebo. In the placebo group, 100 people had serious health events from all causes — car accidents, overdose, cancer, heart-attack, stroke, and other causes including Disease X. In the medicated group, 200 people had serious health events from the same “all causes”. We should conclude, then, that in some way, Medicine X had a negative effect on health even if it mitigated Disease X. At first glance, it might seem strange to include injury from a car accident in the assessment of a drug, but unanticipated adverse effects are notoriously difficult to discern, precisely because they are unanticipated. For example, suppose a person “Joe” received Medicine X, and it caused minor clots throughout his body. While Joe was driving, a clot broke loose and lodged in his brain, causing him to stroke and wreck his car. It would be nearly impossible to trace the true root cause of Joe’s injuries back to Medicine X. But if Joe were part of a large clinical trial, these sorts of obscure effects of Medicine X would add up among the trial participants and manifest themselves in the cumulative serious health events due to “all causes”.

Using the phrase “all-cause morbidity” to mean all serious health events, Dr. Classen found from the published clinical trial data alone that for all available COVID vaccinations, all-cause morbidity was significantly greater for the vaccinated group than for the control group. Among the three available vaccines, the one from Pfizer fared the best, with 262 serious health events in the vaccinated group (among 21,720 participants) vs. 172 serious health events in the control group (among 21,728 participants). (There were two deaths in the vaccinated group and four deaths in the control group, but it is unclear from the original data whether any of these had COVID at the time of death.)

From this analysis, Dr. Classen concluded “the vaccines fail to show any health benefit and in fact, all the vaccines cause a decline in health in the immunized groups.” Of course, Dr. Classen’s conclusion should be even more emphatic for the under-18 population, who rarely become seriously ill with COVID, and who have much longer to live with the side-effects of the vaccine.

Informed by Dr. Classen’s analysis and her own experience, Lt. Col. Theresa Long (MD, MPH, and Brigade Surgeon for the 1st Aviation Brigade in Ft. Rucker, Alabama) made an affidavit, formally claiming whistleblower protection, to explain her assessment that all available COVID vaccines “in the age group and fitness level of my patients, are more risky, harmful and dangerous than having no vaccine at all, whether a person is COVID recovered or facing COVID-19 infection.” Lt. Col. Long’s patients, healthy pilots in their 20s and 30s, are only slightly older than the population under consideration here.

Alarmed by the rush to inject children, 93 Israeli physicians have signed a public letter condemning the use of COVID vaccines on children, warning that “it cannot be ruled out that the vaccine will have long-term adverse effects that have not yet been discovered at this time, including on growth, reproductive system or fertility … Coronavirus disease does not endanger children, and the first rule in medicine is ‘first do not harm.’” The signatories included Dr. Amir Shachar, emergency-room director at Laniado Hospital in Netanya and Avi Mizrahi, ICU director at Kaplan Hospital in Rehovot.

On what grounds, then, do manufacturers claim their vaccines to be “safe and effective,” especially for children? Well, it’s not surprising that they didn’t find what they were never looking for in the first place. They did not evaluate biomarkers that would indicate adverse effects prior to symptomatic expression. They did not actively solicit adverse effects from trial participants beyond 7 days. Finally, they carefully defined the word “effective” to mean “developed the scripted antibodies and had fewer infections with SARs-CoV-2”.

Now, we return to the question with which we began: What about the several hundred children who are dying each year with COVID? The ethical answer is most assuredly not to vaccinate 70 million American children. The ethical answer to this question is a) to develop screening procedures to identify those children most at risk for severe infection and b) to develop and deliver therapeutic treatments that really help them.

However, vaccinating children for COVID was never really about helping the children themselves. No one should be naïve here: The project to vaccinate children is now (and has always been) about protecting the adults around them. Dr. Nowalk asserts this reason in his interview, saying that “those children can often act as spreaders to other people in the community. So they’re an important group to focus on.” This is grossly unethical medicine. Only barbarians use children as human shields for adults. In civilized societies, adults are willing to put themselves at risk to protect children.

Mass vaccination of our youth is a looming moral and public-health catastrophe. Parents should not succumb to public pressure to vaccinate their children. No school district should make attendance subject to vaccination. Public servants have a special responsibility to protect children; they should start asking serious questions and stop mindlessly repeating Big Pharma’s mantra that the vaccines are “safe and effective” for children. Pro-life organizations must recognize this threat for what it is — an attempt to use children’s bodies to protect adults — and mount a resistance. Clergy must stop recommending this vaccine and facilitating its distribution to children. (Our own Catholic Charities of East Tennessee is providing free transportation for children to be vaccinated.) Finally, all clinical trials which test COVID vaccinations on children should be stopped immediately, because none of them stand a mathematical chance of improving children’s overall health.

Jennifer Hay lives in Farragut, Tennessee.  She is a Catholic mother of six children, none of whom are impressed with her career as a mechanical engineer for a Fortune 500 company, her four patents, or her many, varied, and well-cited publications in scientific journals.