Guidance weighed heavily by states deciding on public school mandates

Art Moore
WND News Center

Despite strong opposition from the public and prominent medical scientists citing scientific data, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted 15-0 Thursday to recommend adding the unlicensed, experimental COVID-19 vaccinations to the agency’s childhood vaccination schedule.

Only states have the authority to mandate vaccines for public school children, but they typically adopt the CDC’s guidance. And, significantly, many legal and health experts believe the CDC’s imprimatur gives the vaccine manufacturers permanent liability protection.

Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown law professor who specializes in global health and advocates COVID vaccination for children, said the advisory panel’s approval – which almost certainly will be adopted by the CDC  – “means most states will either [recommend] or require COVID vaccines for school entry.”

However, Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, said prior to the vote that regardless of the outcome, his state will not recommend the COVID-19 vaccine for healthy children. He has argued that data show children have virtually no risk of severe illness from COVID while the shots have a risk of severe adverse events, as indicated by the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting database run by the CDC and the FDA.

After the vote, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis assured parents in his state that as long as he is governor, “there will be no COVID shot mandates for your kids.”

Arizona Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake vowed Thursday that if elected, she would emulate DeSantis.

By adding the COVID shots to the childhood schedule, points out the non-profit legal group Liberty Counsel, liability for vaccine injuries is transferred to the federal government’s National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

“This delivers permanent legal protection to Pfizer and Moderna by allowing them to bring an FDA-approved shot to the market without facing lawsuits and bring in billions of dollars in revenues for the drug companies,” Liberty Counsel said after the vote.

Current, the pharmaceutical companies are not liable for injuries or deaths associated with vaccines given emergency use authorization. But adding the COVID vaccine to the childhood schedule, Liberty Counsel said, means that after the “emergency” ends, the liability protection continues.

‘No convincing evidence’

Dr. Vinay Prasad argued in a thread on Twitter that there is “no convincing evidence it helps the 86% of kids who already had COVID.”

Further, a new study published by JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that one in every 500 children under five years who received the Pfizer COVID vaccine were hospitalized with a vaccine injury. And one in 200 had symptoms that continued for weeks or months.

The CDC received more than 86,000 public comments ahead of the vaccine panel’s meeting. More than 1,300 were posted online.

A typical comment came from Crystal Merwin, LPN: “Covid 19 vaccines are not safe for children. There is increasing numbers of children, especially males that are having cardiac issues from this vaccine. This is well documented in this country and several other countries as well. The vaccines does NOT prevent Covid infection. Children actually are able to fight this virus without this being vaccinated. The fatality rate from a Covid infection in children is low. The Influenza vaccine is not required for school age children. Getting a Flu or Covid vaccine should not be mandatory.”

Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of the mRNA technology that later was used in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, said the CDC panel’s decision “is based on regulatory capture, budgetary issues, politics, and it is not based on scientific data.”

“We all know the adverse event profile. It is horrific. The small sample size in the clinical trials were poorly designed and inadequately powered,” he said on his Substack page before the vote.

He noted that other countries, such as Denmark, have stopped giving the COVID vaccine to children.

Adding the COVID vaccine to the childhood vaccination schedule will “completely break the trust of the American family in the CDC, as it should.

“I am shocked by the malfeasance,” Malone said. “I have no trust left at all in our public health. It is broken.”

‘No meaningfully positive impact’

The American Association of Physicians and Surgeons said in a statement before the vote that adding the COVID vaccine to the list of routine vaccines is a dangerous idea that will only benefit the vaccine manufacturers at the expense of the best interests of kids.”

“Not only do the shots have essentially no meaningfully positive impact on children’s health, the fact that the risk of severe adverse events are greater than any potential small benefit is becoming increasingly evident,” the group said.

The AAPS submitted comment to the CDC citing evidence the COVID shots are of no potential benefit to children, with low to negative efficacy, while presenting an unacceptable risk of severe harm.

Dr. Harvey Risch: ‘Failure for public health policy’

In an interview Friday with WND, Dr. Harvey Risch, emeritus professor at the Yale University School of Public Health, affirmed that the vaccines provide virtually no benefit for children while posing serious risks.

“What we’ve learned over the past two, two and a half years, is that the vaccines are a failure for public health policy,” he said, noting the CDC itself acknowledged in August that any protection against infection and transmission is only “transient.”

The failure to prevent transmission, Risch argued, means there is no legal ground for the government or any institution to mandate the vaccines.