Reacting to Florida becoming the first state to officially recommend against vaccinating children for COVID-19, White House press secretary Jen Psaki insisted Monday that the vaccines are safe and effective, and accused Gov. Ron DeSantis and his surgeon general of “peddling conspiracy theories.”
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo made the announcement Monday at the end of a roundtable of epidemiologists and other medical scientists hosted by DeSantis titled “The Curtain Close on COVID Theater.”
Asked by a reporter at the White House if Ladapo’s recommendation is “good policy,” Psaki replied, “Absolutely not.”
“Let me just note that we know the science,” she said. “We know the data and what works, and what the most effective steps are in protecting people of a range of ages from hospitalization and even death.”
Psaki said the FDA and the CDC “already have weighed in on the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines for those 5 and older.”
However, the Pfizer clinical trials did not examine the risk of death and hospitalization among children. And the FDA panel she referenced recommended the vaccine for children 5-11 with reluctance, citing the lack of safety data. Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, said for example that myocarditis is “a side effect that we can’t measure yet.” But he concluded the shots should be given to children anyway.
“We’re never going to learn about how safe the vaccine is unless we start giving it,” he argued. “That’s just the way it goes.”
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky acknowledged last week that she and her agency were wrong when they told the public the vaccines were 95% effective in stopping infection and transmission. Also last week New York state health officials released a study showing the Pfizer vaccine is only 12% effective for children ages 5 to 11 amid the omicron wave. And new data from many countries indicate people who are fully vaccinated have a higher risk of hospitalization and death than the vaccinated. Data from the CDC itself shows a massive increase in COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations among the fully vaccinated.
Participants in the Florida forum included Drs. Robert Malone, Harvey Risch of Yale, Jay Battacharya of Stanford, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford and Martin Kulldorf, formerly of Harvard.
Psaki contended “we also know through the data that unvaccinated teenagers are three times as likely to be hospitalized if they get COVID than vaccinated teenagers.”
“So, it’s deeply disturbing that there are politicians peddling conspiracy theories out there and casting doubt on vaccinations, when it it our best tool against the virus and the best tool to prevent even teenagers from being hospitalized,” she said.
However, CDC data show that healthy children and adolescents, statistically, have nearly zero chance of death from COVID-19 while studies show an increased risk of serious illness from COVID vaccination.
Further, CDC officials have acknowledged hiding from the public most of the agency’s COVID data for fear it would be misinterpreted by critics. Meanwhile, Walensky still refuses to fulfill her promise to a Senate committee to provide data on vaccine-related deaths. And the FDA last week released 55,000 pages of Pfizer clinical trial data – after attempting to keep it hidden for 75 years – that is now being examined by scientists and others who already have pointed to signals, such as the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, indicating unprecedented vaccine injuries and deaths.
The VAERS data – with more than 24,000 deaths and 1 million adverse events linked to the vaccines – is consistent with, among other things, the alarming trend observed in the insurance industry, the spike in sudden deaths and heart attacks in healthy athletes, the testimonies of vaccine-injured people and the more than 1,000 peer-reviewed studies presenting evidence of vaccine-related adverse events.
See Psaki’s reaction to Florida’s announcement:
See “The Curtain Close on COVID Theater” event in Florida on Monday: