Should Children be Vaccinated against COVID-19?
Increasingly, experts say that the risks outweigh the benefits.
In May 2021, 60 UK doctors sent a letter to the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) expressing their “grave concern” about the rush to vaccinate young children “as fast as we can.” They cited the recent circulation of emotionally loaded teaching materials that encourage school teachers to coerce students to be vaccinated and extol students to apply peer pressure on each other.
Rhetoric such as this is irresponsible and unethical, and encourages the public to demand the vaccination of minors with a product still at the research stage and about which no medium- or long-term effects are known, against a disease which presents no material risk to them.
Among the reasons for their concern are the following (from their letter):
- For COVID-19 vaccines, the potential benefits are clear for the elderly and vulnerable, however, for children, the balance of benefit and risk would be quite different.
- Healthy children are at almost no risk from COVID-19, with risk of death as low as 1 in 2.5 million. No previously healthy child under the age of 15 died during the pandemic in the UK and admissions to hospital or intensive care are exceedingly rare with…
