COVID-19 Vaccination of Minors Without Parental Consent/ JAMA Pediatrics

JAMA Pediatrics published an article last month that should frighten every parent. The lead author is a young lady named Larissa Morgan who got her Bachelor's degree from UPenn in 2013 and she just graduated with the Penn law school class of 2021.  In between, she got a Master's in Bioethics (MBE).  None of the authors are doctors or nurses. And she is not a Member of the British Empire, either.

The second author is Jason Schwartz, a health policy professor at Yale who has copublished with Art Caplan and loves mandatory vaccinations, especially for schoolkids receiving HPV vaccines.  The third author is a bioethics professor at Penn, Dominic Sisti, who has retreeted Dorit Reiss' tweets, also worked with Art Caplan, and is a proponent of assisted suicide, aka death with dignity, aka eugenics, aka health professionals murdering patients.  

I used the word murder advisedly, because it is a slippery slope when you give doctors the right to end life as well as try to save it.  Are we sliding down it now with the hospital approach to COVID?  Admit.  Give remdesivir.  Ventilate.  Restrict useful drugs.

One might look into how the health professionals' culture in Germany evolved to allowing health professionals to feel good about killing the less abled.  

BTW, anyone can call themself a bioethicist. These days, most of them, and especially Art Caplan, are for-sale mouthpieces and rubber stampers who will give an ethical imprimatur to just about anything.

In this case, they gave their imprimatur to removing parental authority over vaccinations in children aged 12 and up.  Not just for COVID vaccines; they suggest in their final two paragraphs that children should be allowed to consent for any vaccine.

The authors slip, and give themselves away in the third to last paragraph, which states that "children and adolescents should not be placed at continued risk due to their parents' hesitancy over COVID-19 vaccines."  

So they are blazing the trail to get around vaccine hesitancy:  go straight to the children. Hear that, Big Bird? Give the kids gift cards, school vaccination clinics, and a dose of peer pressure, and the government will have almost effortlessly usurped Americans' parental rights.

Best of all, with EUA vaccines, the government won't have to pay for any injuries.  And the government owns all the data, which makes it hard to prove that your child's injury was due to a vaccine, if the government denies it.  The only avenue to obtaining benefits for injuries is the DHHS' Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, which has a one year statute of limitations and has yet to pay out a single claim for a COVID vaccine or drug. The DHHS owns all the adverse event data.

"Has the CICP made any decisions regarding COVID-19 Claims?

As of October 1, 2021, the CICP has not compensated any COVID-19 countermeasures claims. Three COVID-19 countermeasures have been denied compensation because the standard of proof for causation was not met and/or a covered injury was not sustained.  One COVID-19 claim has been determined eligible for compensation and is pending a review of eligible expenses."

Here are some quotes from the JAMA article, in italics, with my comments in parentheses.

Although COVID-19 illness is generally less severe in younger people, the disease has nonetheless caused substantial morbidity and more than 325 deaths among US children and adolescents, a burden of disease greater than that of many diseases for which vaccines are routinely recommended in this age group. [Yes, but aren't those vaccines a lot safer than COVID vaccines, and don't they prevent you getting the disease and transmitting it?]

Approximately one-third of confirmed COVID-19 cases in minors have been asymptomatic, creating an opportunity for minors to spread the virus unknowingly. The reduction of asymptomatic transmission is essential to slowing the spread of the virus, and growing evidence suggests that vaccination provides substantial public health benefits by decreasing transmission in addition to its direct, individual benefits.  [In fact, growing evidence shows the vaccines fail to halt transmission.  The vaccinated have equally high viral titers as the unvaccinated and are therefore equally good transmitters, as shown in studies of nasal carriage and a study of household transmission.]  For these reasons, there is an urgent need for increased immunization in younger age groups. Vaccinating minors is critical to protecting them from the virus, [which is an infinitessimal threat to them] reducing transmission—especially to higher-risk populations—and continuing progress toward herd immunity. [Herd immunity cannot be achieved with current vaccines, according to Sir Andrew Pollard, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group and coinventor of the Astra-Zeneca vaccine.]

Children and adolescents have the capacity to understand and reason about low-risk and high-benefit health care interventions. State laws should therefore authorize minors to consent to COVID-19 vaccination without parental permission.

Kaiser confirms that in cities such as San Francisco and Philadelphia (where U Penn just happens to be located) health authorities have in fact been vaccinating children aged 12 and up for COVID without parental permission, and despite the fact that California and Pennsylvania require minors to have parental consent.  We have entered a lawless, treacherous time.  Is it time to say NO yet?

UPDATE November 13, 2021:  The Infants Act (law in British Columbia, Canada) does away with parental consent, but also makes a child's vaccination status a secret to be kept from the parents. Here is what the BC healthlink website says, 

Although there is no set age for when a child becomes capable, common practice is for parents or guardians of children in grade 6 to give consent for their child to be immunized. However, children in grade 9 and older are given the opportunity to consent for themselves. If a child refuses a vaccine for which their parent or guardian has consented, they must be informed of the risks of not having it...

Can a parent or guardian provide consent for a child in grade 9?

Consent forms and immunization information such as HealthLinkBC Files for immunizations given in school will be sent home. Parents or guardians and their children are encouraged to review the information, discuss it, and make a decision about immunization together. This can be used as an opportunity for adolescents to start making decisions about their own health. Children in grade 9 and older will have the opportunity to make their own decision to be immunized whether or not they have a consent form signed by a parent or guardian.

The immunization records of any child who gives their own consent will not be shared with the parent or guardian, unless the child gives permission.