What’s New in Psychology?
The Safety of COVID-19 Vaccines with Children
Jim Windell
Many parents may be vaccine resistant because they believe that vaccines are dangerous. One argument that has been advanced by anti-vaxxers is that the COVID-19 vaccine was so rushed into production and use that the safety of the widely-used vaccines has not been established.
Others, especially parents who do not want to expose their children to the “risks” of COVID-19 vaccines, believe that children will be harmed more from the vaccine than from Covid-19. One reason for such beliefs can be laid at the feet of Steve Kirsch. Kirsch is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who made his fortune as the founder of Infoseek, an early search engine that was the Google of its day. Kirsch has spent tens of millions of dollars fighting humanity’s biggest threats, such as the Covid pandemic. He also puts out a newsletter. In an edition of his newsletter he recently stated that “they've now killed close to twice as many kids from the vaccine as have died from COVID.”
Kirsch has repeated this claim in interviews and it appears in The New American, a conservative news site.
But, is there any truth to this claim?
Kirsch has asserted that he uses data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), an open system for accepting unverified reports about possible vaccine side effects. However, as stated on the VAERS website, “VAERS is a passive reporting system, meaning it relies on individuals to send in reports of their experiences to CDC and FDA. VAERS is not designed to determine if a vaccine caused a health problem.”
But what are the facts as they can be determined?
As of late December, 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that among children and young people between birth and 18 years of age, 790 have died from COVID-19. There are no – that is zero! – verified deaths of children as a result of taking a vaccine prescribed for COVID-19.
Furthermore, in the clinical trials with thousands of children, no serious safety concerns were identified. Returning to information contained in VAERS, that website received 10,483 reports of death among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine. Although reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination does not necessarily mean that a vaccine actually caused a health problem, still given that 485 million doses of the vaccine have been administered, the percentage of reported deaths is .0022 (two one-thousands of a percent).
Jennifer Su, M.D., a pediatric cardiologist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, ad Michael Neely, M.D., MSc. and chief of infectious diseases, also at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, say that there is an observed increased risk for heart inflammation in adolescents and young adults who have recently received either the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. Most of these cases have been in teen boys and young men, ages 12 to 29. However, even though both myocarditis and pericarditis have been reported, the risk of these reactions is very low – roughly 0.01%, or 1 in 10,000 cases.
Despite these risks, both Su and Neely say that children should absolutely receive the vaccine. Su points out that there is no completely risk-free choice. Yet, she says that, “As a cardiologist, I am much less concerned about a very rare and usually self-resolving vaccine reaction than I am about COVID-19 and how it can impact our kids. The benefits of the vaccine far outweigh the risks.”
Dr. Neely adds that over 7 billion doses of various COVID-19 vaccines have been given to more than 4 billion people around the world so far. “With any therapy or medicine, there will always be rare events,” Neely says. “But these vaccines are among the safest and most effective ever developed. We have a lot of data now to show that.”
To read the original article, find it here:
Vaccines have not killed "twice as many kids" as those that were killed by COVID (newswise.com)
And an article about Steve Kirsch is available in the MIT Technology Review: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/05/1036408/silicon-valley-millionaire-steve-kirsch-covid-vaccine-misinformation/
