3 Oxford University Infectious Disease Experts Say No To COVID Vaccines For Children

An opinion article published in the European Journal of Medical Ethics in early July 2021 explains why children should not be required or encouraged to take the COVID-19 vaccine at this time.

The perspective shared by these experts is completely in contrast to governing health authorities around the world, but they join a very large number of doctors and scientists who oppose government policy during COVID.

Regardless of their expertise, experts like these are not acknowledged or engaged on a public scale, but instead censored. Social media platforms have removed and put warning labels on hundreds of millions of pieces of content relating to this pandemic, and an uncountable amount of evidence based material has been caught in the dragnet of "fake news."

Sunetra Gupta, an infectious disease epidemiologist from the University of Oxford, Carl Heneghan, an NHS urgent care doctors and Professor of Evidence Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, and Alberto Giubilini, senior research fellow in infectious diseases at Oxford as well make their position on vaccinating children quite clear below.

The risks of COVID-19 for children and young people are minimal. For example, ‘[i]n the USA, UK, Italy, Germany, Spain, France and South Korea, deaths from COVID-19 in children remained rare up to February 2021 (ie, up to the time the study had available data about), at 0.17 per 100 000 population’.7 The long-term risks of the novel COVID-19 vaccines on a population of millions of children are at the moment unknown, given that the clinical trials involved a few thousands of subjects over a few months period.

Vaccinating children would be a way of treating them as mere means to serve other people’s interests or some form of collective good. We already did this through indiscriminate lockdowns and other restrictions, such as school closure. Using children as means or even mere means in this way is not necessarily wrong, but it can only be justified if the cost imposed is sufficiently small and the benefit sufficiently large.7 Unfortunately, currently available COVID-19 vaccines do not meet either condition, given our current state of knowledge.

Not only would vaccinating children pose risks on them without any substantial direct benefit. Also, vaccinating children can only offer collective good if this reduces infection levels in the community. However, while COVID-19 vaccines almost certainly will provide long-term protection against severe disease and death, their infection blocking effects are incomplete and very likely to be transient. This means there is actually no collective benefit to trade off against individual harm to children, unless we perform mass vaccination on a regular basis, for example, annually. But this would compound the potential harms.

The authors note that vaccination can be beneficial to the elderly and those who are perhaps immunocompromised, and advocate for a more focused approach on that segment. This focused approach would be instead of the use of strict measures, like lockdowns, mask mandates and more. They recognize the harm these harsh measures have on society as a whole and believe in an approach outlined in the Great Barrington Declaration.

They finish their statement with the following,

During the pandemic, we have often treated children as mere means. The only reason why we have imposed this burden on children is to serve other people’s or broader societal interests. These measures have not been in the interest of children, nor where they intended to be. The burden on them has been vast and the benefit of lockdowns for the collective at the very least questionable.8 9 We should not make the same mistakes with vaccination policies.

Right now, we are masking healthy people. We are quarantining healthy people. We are giving up individual sovereignty for the alleged benefit of the whole, but we are not creating healthy and empowered individuals. A philosophy hundreds of millions oppose.

If infected with COVID-19, children ages 0-9 have on average a chance of 0.1% or 1/1000 of being hospitalized and, for ages 11-19 a 0.2% or 1/500 chance of being admitted to the hospital (Herrera-Esposito, 2021). This is based on seroprevalence data from eight locations around the world: England; France; Ireland; Netherlands; Spain; Atlanta, USA; New York, USA; Geneva, Switzerland. The infection fatality rate for 0–9-year-olds is estimated to be less than 1 in 200,000 (less than 5 in 1 million) and 1 in 55,000 for 10–19 year-olds.

As of May 28, 2021, there have been 259,308 confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections in Canadians 19 years and under. Of these, 0.48% were hospitalized, 0.06% were admitted to ICU, and 0.004% died .For children, seasonal influenza is associated with more severe illness than COVID-19.

According to a recent study by Stanford academics, if a child is infected with COVID, they have a nearly 100 percent survival rate.

This has been a common theme throughout the pandemic. Jonas F Ludvigsson a paediatrician at Örebro University Hospital and professor of clinical epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute has published research showing that out of nearly 2 million school children, zero died from COVID despite no lockdowns, no school closings, and no mask mandates during the first wave of the pandemic.

In a pre-COVID-19 vaccine cohort of 1391 children, 171 (12.3%) were confirmed to have SARS-CoV-2 infection and treated at the Wuhan Children’s Hospital from Jan 28 – Feb 26, 2020 (Note this is the only center assigned by the central government for treating infected children under 16 years of age in Wuhan) Median age was 6.7 years. 3 patients required intensive care and invasive mechanical ventilation – all had coexisting conditions. 1 patient died, a 10-month-old with intussusception and multi-organ failure.

The American Academy of Pediatrics also confirmed that while the Delta variant is infecting more children, it is not causing increased disease severity. They also found that 0.1-1.9% of their child COVID-19 cases resulted in hospitalizations, and 0.00-0.03% of all child covid-19 case resulted in death.

While many studies suggest pre-symptomatic/asymptomatic spread may comprise > 40% of vertical transmission, numerous large observational population studies show that children are POOR COVID-19 spreaders. This includes studies from Ireland, Iceland, Italy, France, and Australia. For a link to a more complete reference list, see Washington University Pediatric & Adolescent Ambulatory Research Consortium.

Here is another guide for parents if you're interested via The Canadian COVID Care Alliance. They are a group of more than 100 Canadian doctors, scientists and professors from Canada.