Letter to ex-partners who want to Covid vaccinate children
Dear [name],
I hope you're well.
As we've been unable to come to an agreement regarding [name of child] and the Covid vaccine, I just wanted to put some of my concerns down in writing, in the hope that this will help you better understand where I'm coming from, and move the conversation further along. I'm including a reference section at the end, just to reassure you I'm getting all my information from official sources, and not from anywhere dubious or unreliable.
I completely understand and appreciate that you only have [name of child's] health and best interests at heart, as, of course, do I. I know we want the same outcome, which the safest and healthiest future possible for [name] With this in mind, the primary reason I don't want [name] to receive the Covid vaccine is that all available evidence strongly suggests that, for [name]’s age-group, the risks of this vaccine outweigh any benefits. Please note that the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), the official advisory body to the government on vaccinations, ruled that the risk to healthy under-16s from the vaccine outweighed any health benefits (1), and that it was politicians - not vaccine experts - who overrode this decision and decided to administer it to 12-15-year-olds anyway.
The vast majority of experts agree that there is no health reason for healthy under-16s to receive this vaccine (2), and the reasons cited to give it to them anyway are 'social' and 'educational'. What this effectively means is that the vaccine is being administered to under-16s in the belief that this will protect the wider community - parents and teachers - rather than the child themselves. I just don't think it's acceptable to burden a child with that kind of responsibility or risk.
If there is no health benefit to [name] from taking a powerful and very new medical product, then, of course, I don't want him/her to take it, because medical products should only be taken when they benefit the health of the person taking them, not in order to provide theoretical benefit to others (who can take the vaccine or whatever other precautions they want themselves).
All medical products carry risk, so a risk/benefit analysis always must be carefully carried out before making a decision, and that is especially so for the Covid vaccine, the development of which has been accelerated at an unprecedented rate. Vaccine development usually takes years or decades, but the Covid vaccine has been developed in a matter of months. This means that, by definition, there is no data available on long-term safety. Scientists have tried to develop coronavirus vaccines many times in the past, but have always failed, because trials have consistently revealed the vaccines to be unsafe in the long-term.
Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, who worked on the development of a SARS (a type of coronavirus) vaccine, has issued stark warnings about the accelerated nature of the development of Covid vaccines, cautioning that they were not in clinical trials long enough to eliminate the possibility of serious side effects in months or years to come (3).
When developing the SARS vaccine, Dr. Hotez and his team found that, while the injection initially stimulated a robust immune response, in later trials, test subjects developed a condition known as "vaccine enhancement syndrome" when they came into contact with wild coronaviruses. This resulted in those test subjects who had received the vaccine becoming much more seriously unwell than those who had not, and several of them died. This is why scientists have never been able to bring a coronavirus vaccine to market before, and - given the rapidity with which the Covid vaccines were developed - we cannot rule out the possibility that Covid-vaccinated individuals may develop vaccine enhancement syndrome at some future point.
In addition, worrying reports have emerged showing that the Covid vaccines can induce myocarditis and other heart problems in recipients, and the group most likely to develop such problems are the young. Despite media reports trying to downplay this risk, myocarditis is not a mild condition, and around 50% of those diagnosed die of the condition within five years (4). Cardiac deaths have suddenly and dramatically increased in young, healthy people since the Covid vaccine was introduced, and a new study in a top cardiology journal has pinpointed a clear mechanism by which the Covid vaccine may damage the heart (5).
Obviously, if [name] were to become severely unwell as a result of the vaccine, this would have serious ramifications, not just for him/her, but for you and I, as we would have to radically restructure our lives to care for a disabled child. Please do be aware that the UK government has confirmed that it expects the Covid vaccine to severely disable an unspecified number of individuals (6), but that in order to qualify for compensation for such disability, an individual must meet a number of very stringent criteria, and there are no guarantees that victims of vaccine-induced disability will receive any compensation at all.
Please also note that all vaccine manufacturers are completely legally indemnified against any disability or death their products may cause. Vaccine manufacturers demanded this extremely unusual level of legal protection decades ago, because they were being sued so often by families whose children had been injured or killed by vaccines, that they were at risk of imminent bankruptcy if they kept producing them. Rather than commit to making their products safer, pharmaceutical companies instead issued an ultimatum to government, threatening to stop making vaccines unless the government protected them from all lawsuits, which the government did. So, to sum, these are not maximally safe products, and their manufacturers have very little incentive to make them safer.
Pharmaceutical companies in general are not particularly reputable enterprises and most have very chequered histories regarding falsifying data and false advertising. Many have been repeatedly slapped with civil and criminal fines relating to fraud, with Pfizer (manufacturer of the vaccine approved for 12-15-year-olds) the recipient of the biggest criminal fine for fraud - $2.3 billion - in all of history (7).
I can appreciate that, if someone is very vulnerable and is deemed to be at high risk from Covid, then they may feel it is a worthwhile gamble to take these risks and receive the Covid vaccine anyway. But in the case of [name], who is at effectively zero risk should s/he contract Covid, I feel strongly that vaccinating him/her is just not worth the risk.
Please note that Covid-19 infection is both rare and low-risk to healthy children, and that children only make up around 2% of Covid cases worldwide (8), with only 0.03% of Covid infections in under-21s being fatal (9). When children do contract Covid, they are most likely to have mild or no symptoms (10).
Therefore, the vaccine really offers no direct benefit to [name], and I certainly don't want him/her to be used as a 'body shield' to protect adults, when it is their own responsibility to protect their health, and we adults should be expected to make any necessary sacrifices to protect children, not the other way around. In addition, the Covid vaccine actually doesn’t prevent either the contraction or transmission of disease, with a recent BBC report stating the vaccinated are just as likely to spread Covid as the unvaccinated (11).
As I said, I do completely appreciate you just want to do the best thing for [name's] health and long-term future, and so do I, so it's really important to me that we can come to an agreement on this, and not undermine all of the cooperative and successful co-parenting we have done to date.
Please give me a call if you'd like to discuss this further and I really hope we can come to a mutual agreement and move forward.
Thanks for reading.
[Name]
References:
2) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58438669
4) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK459259/
5) https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/circ.144.suppl_1.10712
6) https://www.gov.uk/vaccine-damage-payment/eligibility
7) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pfizer-settlement-idUSTRE5813XB20090902
8) https://www.rcpch.ac.uk/resources/covid-19-research-evidence-summaries
9) https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6937e4.htm?s_cid=mm6937e4_w
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