OPINION:
“I couldn’t be more pleased to announce that as of today, the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC recommended immunization schedule,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced in May.
At Mr. Kennedy’s recommendation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dismissed its long-standing guidance for children to receive COVID-19 vaccines, instead advising parents to first discuss it with their doctors. The CDC no longer has specific recommendations for pregnant women.
Healthy infants and young children rarely develop severe cases of COVID-19. Children younger than 5 represent about 6% of the U.S. population but account for less than 0.1% of COVID-19 deaths in this country.
“Despite the growth of the childhood vaccine schedule, there has been limited scientific inquiry into the links between vaccines and chronic disease, the impacts of vaccine injury, and conflicts of interest in the development of the vaccine schedule. These areas warrant future inquiry,” said Mr. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” report, also released in May.
Indeed.
In June, the Food and Drug Administration required an updated warning in the labeling of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines regarding myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the lining outside the heart) after vaccination in males ages 12-24.
“Based on analyses of commercial health insurance claims data from inpatient and outpatient settings, the estimated unadjusted incidence of myocarditis and/or pericarditis during the period 1 through 7 days following administration of the 2023-2024 Formula of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines was approximately 8 cases per million doses in individuals 6 months through 64 years of age and approximately 27 cases per million doses in males 12 through 24 years of age,” the new language reads.
The FDA is conducting studies to evaluate the long-term heart effects in people with myocarditis after receiving an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.
These studies are long overdue. For far too long, the federal government, medical professionals, Big Pharma and the mainstream media have used the lack of investigation into the adverse impacts of the novel mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, invented only five years ago, as an excuse for their safety.
Articles that would question the effectiveness of the vaccines, many of them published in The Washington Times during the height of the pandemic, were censored or deemed “misinformation,” put through fact-check purgatory and buried in social media searches, all based on the lack of “scientific evidence” proving their case.
Most women I spoke to at the time experienced period irregularity after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, and yet they were repeatedly assured before and after getting the shot that their fertility wouldn’t be affected. Only now is this being researched.
Worse still, at the time, many of the most ardent proclamations from health authorities — that if you got the vaccine, you could neither contract nor transmit the virus — turned out to be patently wrong.
Then there was the heavy hand of mandating the shot for federal employees and contractors, which bled into the private sector, and the astronomical $90 billion in profits that Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna and Sinovac made on their COVID-19 shots in 2021 and 2022, coupled with blanket federal liability protections for those manufacturers against any American who may look to sue based on any losses their vaccinations caused.
One of President Biden’s final acts in office was extending the liability shield to those producing and administering the COVID-19 vaccines until 2029.
Now, HHS is working to correct those wrongs.
The FDA is working to narrow approval for updated mRNA COVID-19 shots to just older adults and people at a high risk for severe disease. Mr. Kennedy has fired every vaccine adviser on the CDC panel because they were “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest” (e.g., advocated for products in which they had a financial stake) and became a “rubber stamp” for vaccines.
In an op-ed to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Kennedy noted that the panel “never recommended against a vaccine — even those later withdrawn for safety reasons.” He defended the firings as a way to restore public trust in the institution.
Back in 2021, when schools were still closed in many states because of the pandemic and the public pressure campaign was on to approve mRNA COVID-19 shots for our youths — although the children were demonstrably unaffected by the virus — I made the decision not to vaccinate my boys, then ages 7 and 10, no matter what. I also placed them in a private school, where the vaccination would not be mandatory.
It was the best decision I ever made. My boys may or may not have contracted COVID-19; their symptoms were too mild for it to be a disruption in our lives. They’re happy and healthy, unaffected by a pandemic that devastated many through an intense public pressure campaign and societal controls.
I’m glad Mr. Kennedy is working to reinstitute public faith in the federal health bureaucracy, yet much more work needs to be done to restore mine.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at The Washington Times.
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