At a meeting of the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, a voting member admitted he wasn’t sure about the COVID shot’s long-term risk to children despite the committee voting to recommend the Pfizer vaccine for kids ages 5-11.
The committee considered a voting question that read, “Based on the totality of scientific evidence available, do the benefits of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine when administered as a 2-dose series … outweigh its risks for use in children 5-11 years of age?”
While considering the question, one member openly admitted they couldn’t be certain the vaccine is safe while advocating for children to be injected with it, saying, “We’re never going to learn about how safe the vaccine is until we start giving it.”
With one member abstaining, the advisory committee voted 17-0 on Tuesday to recommend the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 shot for emergency use authorization for children aged 5-11. The FDA is set to make a final ruling in the coming days. Should the FDA approve the vaccine for that age group, children in California will be forced to get the shot in order to attend school.
But while the potential long-term risk of administering the shot to children remains unknown, the FDA has argued that “the benefits of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine 2-dose primary series clearly outweigh the risks for ages 5-11 years.”
Of the more than 730,000 reported coronavirus deaths in the United States, only 138 of them were children aged 5-11, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Meanwhile, the CDC has admitted that mRNA vaccinations such as the Pfizer-BioNTech shot can pose serious health risks to young adults and especially male adolescents, who are susceptible to developing myocarditis.
While those who have not yet received the shot have come under intense scrutiny and been ruthlessly mocked and maligned by the corporate media, this admission from an FDA committee member does little to assuage the fears of parents who remain concerned about the shot’s unknown long-term effects on their healthy children.