Concerned Parents Send Blunt Message to Vax Manufacturers as FDA Mulls Approving COVID Shots for Kids
Last week, Pfizer and BioNTech asked the Food and Drug Administration to grant emergency use authorization for their COVID-19 vaccine for children between the ages of 5 and 11.
This came less than one week after California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that Pfizer’s vaccine for patients older than 12 would be required in the state’s public and private schools beginning next year.
President Joe Biden’s “Path Out of the Pandemic” calls for vaccinations for eligible students, so should Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine be given the necessary approval by the FDA to be administered to children as young as five years old, it likely won’t be long before overzealous, like-minded Democrats being doling out the mandates for schoolchildren in their respective localities.
This comes as a heated battle between parents and public schools across the nation continues to rage, in part over masking and other pandemic-related protocols; in part over increasingly ideological curricula and policies that alienate even the most moderate families.
So as many adults, including a stunning number of health care professionals, remain resistant to getting the vaccine for themselves, it comes as little surprise that a majority of the nation’s parents remain either unsure or flat-out opposed to the idea of giving a COVID-19 vaccination to their own children.
According to a CBS News/YouGov poll conducted between Oct. 6-8, a mere 37 percent of parents said they will get the vaccine for their children age 5-11, while almost as many, 35 percent, said they will not. An additional 26 percent remain undecided.
CBS News didn’t emphasize this total figure, but that’s a full 61 percent of parents who are not fully on board with giving their kiddos the jab, and the majority of this figure said they simply won’t do it at all.
Unsurprisingly, vaccinated parents were the most likely to say they would get the vaccine for their younger children, at 61 percent, while 61 percent of unvaccinated parents said they would not. Still, roughly one-fourth of each of these groups, 27 percent and 26 percent respectively, replied “maybe,” and a noteworthy 11 percent of vaccinated parents said they will not be getting the vaccine for their children.
In other words, a lot of parents have concerns about giving the vaccine to their children.
Yet will these concerns be heeded by the power-hungry powers that be?
Sadly, it’s doubtful.
Despite the fact that resistance to a child’s version of the vaccine is perfectly understandable considering how few children have died of the COVID-19 virus and how consistently data shows that they are at a reduced risk of severe complications should they contract it, the hysterical rhetoric surrounding children and COVID-19 only seems to have reached a higher pitch as the eventuality of a child’s jab becomes more firmly established.
One certainly doesn’t know what else to blame for why The New York Times last week egregiously exaggerated the number of children who have been hospitalized with the virus since the start of the pandemic — although the actual reason for why reporter Apoorva Mandavilli used the figure 900,000 instead of the actual number of hospitalizations, 63,000, is unclear.
Children have arguably still suffered the most debilitating restrictions as the result of a virus, from school closures to feckless mask mandates to the psychological trauma of growing up in such a tumultuous time.
After all, for all the immense sympathy we have for ruined small business owners, can one even put a price on the childhoods and key educational milestones millions of public school children have been irredeemably robbed of over the past year?
Meanwhile, as parents have begun to angrily voice their objections to the far-reaching mandates in addition to the decidedly radical curricula they are discovering in their nation’s schools, suddenly they’re being equated to domestic terrorists and targeted by the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Interestingly, of Americans who are committed to not getting the vaccination for themselves, as per CBS’ polling, 61 percent say that this is partly due to a distrust of the government.
This same government doesn’t trust them to make sound decisions about what they inject into their body — and it most certainly doesn’t trust them to be the ultimate authority over what gets injected into their children’s bodies or into their young, impressionable minds.
American parents are already frustrated, exhausted and angry. They are told more and more every day by their governors and president that they don’t have, nor do they deserve, authority over their own bodies or that of their own flesh and blood.
So what’s going to happen when the vaccine is mandated in thousands of schools across the country and an even more ferocious battle over parental choice is launched?
Do you see the mama and papa bears of this nation taking much more of this assault on their rights?
I, for one, most certainly do not.
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