(NaturalHealth365) Earlier this month, a Pfizer executive stated during a virtual symposium with Johns Hopkins University that the pharmaceutical company hopes their experimental mRNA drug will be in the arms of children as young as 5 years old by September or October.  They’re also hoping to get a COVID booster shot out soon in order to protect against the so-called Delta variant of the pandemic virus – even though the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) insist booster shots aren’t needed.

As a parent, do you have questions about your young child getting an experimental mRA shot?  Are you aware that many medical experts also question giving these shots to kids, too?

“The net benefit of [injecting] children is unclear:” Team of medical experts urge caution surrounding COVID shots for kids

Earlier in July, a team of researchers and professors – whose careers span palliative care medicine, medical ethics, pediatric immunity and infection, philosophy, and law – wrote a letter to the BMJ expressing their concerns about the current global push to give the experimental COVID injection to children.  Their position is that the administration of this drug to kids should be delayed.

Their main reasoning: “the net benefit of vaccinating children is unclear.”

“[R]andomised trials to date have given [mRNA jabs] to only about 3,500 adolescents,” the experts point out, adding that these small and hastily performed trials are “not designed to identify rare side effects.”

In their letter, they cite the CDC’s recent admission that heart inflammation, including myocarditis and pericarditis, is a potential adverse event in adolescents who recently received an injection, occurring in an estimated 56-69 cases per million doses.

“We do not know whether other complications will emerge,” the authors state bluntly.

The authors also keenly point out that the “potential benefit” of giving an experimental injection to children is “much smaller” than it is for adults.  Children are exceedingly unlikely to become sick (let alone seriously sick) with COVID-19, and play a “limited role” in the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.  Thus, giving this injection to kids would have a “marginal benefit in protecting others.”

Parents must ultimately weigh the risk-benefit ratio of this COVID shot for their kids – what does this balance look like for you?

It’s worth noting that this team of experts is not anti-jab.  Indeed, they parrot the idea that the benefits of the COVID shot “clearly” outweigh the risks for adults, and warn that rolling out COVID shots for kids before scrutinizing safety data could “harm our wider immunization program” and threaten public confidence in the drugs.

Reading between the lines, these experts appear to be saying on one hand that delaying these shots for kids is necessary to protect their health, but on the other hand, delaying these shots is necessary to prevent “hesitancy” and ensure more vulnerable populations get access to the shot first.

Even with these somewhat conflicting sentiments in mind, it is sound to delay injecting kids with experimental drugs until more safety data is available – especially given what we now know about the strings Pfizer pulled in order to get their drug authorized for emergency use.

Parents:  What do you think?  Do you feel like you have enough information to know whether the benefits outweigh the risks of this experimental drug for your child?  Do you agree with delaying the shot, declining it all together, or opting your child in?

Sources for this article include:

JHU.edu
KHN.org
ScientificAmerican.com
BMJ.com
NPR.org
Eurekalert.org