Should we give babies and children a Covid vaccine? My cautious mind says not
Are some pharmaceutical companies, scientists and politicians becoming jab-happy?
Editorial: I am not yet differentiating between all these new vaccines. For the time being I am grouping the various vaccines together as ‘Covid vaccines’ and thinking of them as a single entity in the international response to the pandemic. They can be validly grouped together because:
- They are all developed in response to a single virus.
- They have all been produced very quickly indeed.
- None have yet stood the test of time that vaccines have always been subject to for their validation.
- When they cause damage or death, now or in months and years to come, it is impossible to claim compensation from the organisations that produced or delivered the vaccines.
The sad fact that one version of the vaccine is now becoming problematic does not prove that all the other versions are safe in the longer term. Surely, some problems will wait many months or years to emerge. If this is true historically of vaccines in general, then might it not be even more true for a family of vaccines produced in such a rush?
My Times newspaper on March 17th said:
‘Six-month-old babies will be part of a study by Moderna to test its vaccine on young children...If successful it could raise the prospect of a childhood inoculation....’
Of course, children cannot opt in or opt out of a vaccine programme as adults can. They will have to live or die with the decisions society and parents make for them.
Is the risk worth taking? The science is confusing at every level of this pandemic, but there has been general agreement that children and babies are not figuring in the data on Covid deaths. So why subject them to the Covid vaccination programme? An important factor in this is the impossibility of claiming compensation when death or damage occurs in years to come – when babies have become teenagers and children have become adults.
Do you, like me, detect an atmosphere of panic and paranoia in this? Are some pharmaceutical companies, scientists and politicians becoming jab-happy?
Those of us who can make decisions about babies and children have a massive responsibility to make the best decisions we can on their behalf.
Peter Limbrick
