How ‘Public Health’ Officials Lie to Parents about COVID-19 Vaccines for 5-11 Year-Old Children

On the morning of December 7, 2021, I saw a new advertisement from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) on the social media platform Nextdoor promoting the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for children as young as age five. The ad directs parents to get more information at a webpage of the Michigan state government.

In this video (on Rumble and Odysee), I review and fact check the ad and the information provided to parents by state health officials, showing how supposedly trustworthy “public health” officials, rather than empowering parents with the knowledge they need to make an informed choice, are misleading and blatantly lying to parents to persuade them to comply with the policy goal of achieving high vaccine uptake.

Deceptions I cover include the following:

• The rationale for vaccinating young children presented in the MDHHS ad falsely assumes that the risk for them is the same as the risk to middle aged adults.
• How the MDHHS claims that the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine and the Comirnaty vaccine are the same thing when in fact they are two distinct products, and Comirnaty is not even currently available in the US.
• How the MDHHS similarly communicates to parents that there is equivalence between FDA “authorization” and FDA “approval”.
• How the MDHHS uses its obfuscation over those product and regulatory distinctions to mislead parents into believing that the Pfizer vaccine has been FDA approved for children aged 5 – 11.
• How the MDHHS falsely claims that the vaccine authorized for emergency use in children aged 5 – 11 has undergone the same type of study and regulatory review as FDA approved vaccines.
• How the MDHHS fails to disclose to parents that if their child is harmed by the vaccine, they cannot sue the manufacturer because the government has granted legal immunity to the pharmaceutical companies for COVID-19 vaccines being made available under emergency use authorization.
• How the MDHHS misleads parents into believing that tens of thousands of children aged 5 – 11 were included in phase three clinical trials for the Pfizer vaccine when in truth the number was 2,268 (1,517 in the experimental group and 751 in the placebo control group). (Only at the very end of the document does MDHHS acknowledge that only a few thousand children in this age group were included, not tens of thousands as they initially imply.)
• How the clinical trial data for children aged 5 – 11 measured only risk of symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection, not severe disease, hospitalization, or death.
• How the data show an absolute risk reduction of just 2% against symptomatic infection, indicating that in order to prevent a single case of symptomatic infection, 51 children need to be vaccinated.
• How for children with evidence of prior infection, which is evidence of natural immunity, the risk reduction was 0% (no children previously infected had symptomatic infection).
• How seroprevalence data presented by the CDC to the FDA’s advisory committee that recommended authorization of the Pfizer vaccine for children aged 5 – 11 indicated that 42% of children had already been infected through June 2021, which is likely an underestimate both because more children have since been infected and because the antibody test used likely missed some cases of prior infection.
• How the MDHHS implies that vaccinating children aged 5 – 11 will contribute to the development of herd immunity when in truth the effectiveness of the vaccines against infection wanes rapidly and fully vaccinated individuals can transmit the virus to others.
• How the MDHHS tells parents that it is safe for them to get their children aged 5 – 11 to get the COVID-19 vaccine coadministered with other vaccines including flu shots, even though the FDA and Pfizer-BioNTech disclose that there are “no data” to support this claim.
• How the MDHHS blatantly lies that the scientific evidence “suggests natural immunity from COVID-19 may not last very long” when just the opposite is true, with studies having shown that natural immunity includes persistence of circulating antibodies, immunological memory and long-lived bone marrow plasma cells capable of rapidly ramping up antibody production in the event of re-exposure, and cellular immune responses that appear to be even more important than antibodies for protection against COVID-19.
• How the MDHHS tells parent that it’s safe for people who have already recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection to get fully vaccinated, when in fact evidence of prior infection was an exclusion criterion in phase three trials and observational studies have consistently found that people with prior infection are at greater risk of experiencing adverse events from getting a COVID-19 vaccine, which some researchers have attributed to over-activation of the immune system.

Sources:

Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, Advertisement, “One Family’s Reason,” Nextdoor, Posted and accessed on December 7, 2021, https://nextdoor.com/p/j7XdK82KZBsQ.

Michigan State Government, “Kids COVID-19 Vaccine,” Michigan.gov, accessed December 7, 2021, https://www.michigan.gov/coronavirus/0,9753,7-406-98178_103214_109111—,00.html.

Michigan State Government, “COVID-19 Vaccine Questions and Answers for Parents,” Michigan.gov, November 3, 2021, accessed December 7, 2021, https://www.michigan.gov/documents/coronavirus/Parent_FAQs_5.14_Final_725378_7.pdf.

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