In a move championed by many parents and supported by recent scientific research, Florida has become the first state to officially recommend against COVID vaccinations for healthy children.
Florida’s Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, made the announcement on Monday during a “’roundtable discussion’ titled, ‘The Curtain Close on COVID Theater,'” according to The Epoch Times
“The Florida Department of Health is going to be the first state [department] to officially recommend against the COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children,” Ladapo said.
The Florida Department of Health has not updated their website, which currently reads: “[COVID vaccines] are the most effective tools to protect your health and prevent the spread of disease…[vaccines] “are safe, free, and highly effective, including against known variants.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declined to comment on Florida’s decision. They did, however, reiterate their current guidance, which strongly encourages children as young as age 5 to receive Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, and children 12 and older receive a booster shot because of waning vaccine effectiveness.
Following Ladapo’s announcement at the roundtable meeting, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis spoke of the need to employ logic and perspective in dealing with the pandemic.
“[What… we’ve seen, [is] a failure to weigh costs and benefits, whether that’s lockdowns, whether that’s school closures, or whether that’s even something about whether a healthy 7-year-old kid should get the COVID vaccine.”
The CDC is adamant about the need for young children to be vaccinated but recognizes that “just 663 of the 914,259 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the United States during the pandemic have been among those 18 or younger,” according to local Florida news outlet WESH 2. In addition, few children who have contracted COVID require hospital care.
The Florida announcement follows three recent studies which concluded that children should not receive COVID vaccinations.
Dr. Tracy Hoeg, an epidemiologist who analyzed the risks and benefits of COVID vaccinations, confirms that the recent data undermines arguments for vaccinating children.
“We need to make sure that we’re not doing overall harm by vaccinating children when we don’t know if there’s a benefit. And we have this known safety signal, which we analyzed in our paper, which is myocarditis in boys, especially, more than girls—it also exists in girls—and young men,” Hoeg said.
“And so even for boys who are previously healthy, who haven’t been previously infected, we didn’t find that there was a benefit—there was actually an overall risk of giving them the second dose.”
Dr. Hoeg continued: “And so these are the type of analyses that we need to do in a rigorous manner and until we know the answer to this, and until we’re sure that we’re not overall doing more harm than good, we need to be able to give parents and children the choice about whether or not they should be vaccinated.”
Supporting Dr. Hoeg’s assessment, Dr. Marty Makary, a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins Medicine, said:
“If you have a child with risk factors to COVID, that’s a discussion with your pediatrician, but if you have a healthy child, your chances of that child dying are incredibly low. Essentially close to zero, if not zero.”
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