Biden COVID Czar Expects Babies and Toddlers Under 5 to Begin Shots by June 21
Children as young as six months to under five years of age could be eligible to receive their first COVID vaccine shot by June 21, Joe Biden’s COVID czar Dr. Ashish Jha said Thursday during a press briefing.
“[T]he FDA is currently working through a rigorous and independent scientific process,” Jha said, adding:
As part of that, the FDA’s advisory committee — VRBPAC — will be meeting on June 14th and 15th. They will review the data submitted by Pfizer and Moderna for their vaccines, and we expect an FDA decision shortly after the advisory committee meeting. And we look forward to this process playing out.
Once the FDA and CDC approve the vaccines, Jha told reporters, “We expect that vaccinations will begin in earnest as early as Tuesday, June 21.”
But, recall what happened last October when the FDA independent advisory panel voted to approve use of the vaccine for children of ages 5-11 years. Eric Rubin, M.D., a member of the panel and the editor-in-chief of New England Journal of Medicine, said, as he voted his approval, “We’re never gonna learn about how safe the vaccine is until we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes.”
Jha apparently comes from a world in which “many, many parents are eager to vaccinate their youngest kids” with drugs whose safety has yet to be proven and the ineffectiveness of which is clearly visible from the numbers of individuals in other age groups who have been vaccinated and boosted, yet have gotten COVID and have even been hospitalized.
Walgreens pharmacy chain began tracking COVID positivity rates and has included vaccination status in its charts. The data reveal the unvaxxed have the lowest positivity rate for COVID, while those who received three doses of the vaccine show the highest positivity rate.
Renowned cardiologist and co-author of The Courage to Face COVID-19, Dr. Peter McCullough recently appeared on Fox News Channel’s The Ingraham Angle where he pointed out the top vaxxed states now have the highest percentage of hospitalizations due to COVID.
McCullough explained the Omicron variant “is finding pockets of susceptible individuals.”
“These are largely people who have taken one, two, three, or four vaccines, vaccinations, and they’ve actually contracted the virus so … they haven’t previously had COVID-19,” he said. “They’re susceptible and the vaccine is not protecting them against the current Omicron strains. And so, it happens to be in the most vaccinated states.”
A recent report at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution also observed what it called an “unusual trend: The Georgians who are fully vaccinated and boosted are increasingly winding up in the hospital with serious COVID-19 symptoms”:
The circulating omicron variant has become better at evading the vaccine, which was designed on the first version of coronavirus to appear in China. And the people most likely to get boosted are those who were most vulnerable to begin with: the elderly, or patients with pre-existing conditions. Despite the extra vaccine protection, those people remain the most vulnerable.
The “good news,” Jha said, is “that we have plenty of supply of both Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to start our vaccination program” for the youngest of children, who, we know, bear the least risk of serious illness from catching the COVID infection.
“And we are going to make 10 million doses available to states, pharmacies, and community health centers, and federal entities to order initially,” the COVID czar said. “Starting tomorrow, states can begin to place their orders.”
So desperate is Jha to get the youngest kids jabbed that he wants states and healthcare providers to “find ways to ensure that parents have access to these vaccines for their kids outside of normal work hours, because we want to make this as easy as possible for working parents and their families.”
Americans’ tax dollars paid for this ad from the Department of Health and Human Services featuring the heads of the “mass formation” establishment medical associations urging parents to get their children vaccinated.
“[I]t’s worth noting how much progress we’ve made,” Jha boasted at the press briefing. “Two thirds of all Americans are now fully vaccinated, close to a third of all Americans are boosted, and highly effective treatment — effective treatments are widely available.”
Of course, in November 2020, Jha penned an op-ed at the New York Times that led with the headline, “The Snake-Oil Salesmen of the Senate,” in which he ridiculed Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Drs. Peter McCullough, Harvey Risch, and George Fareed – all practitioners who have successfully treated patients with COVID with inexpensive, repurposed drugs, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
“And what we know is that we’ve got to keep vaccinating, keep reaching people who have not gotten vaccinated, keep making treatments widely available,” Jha said Thursday. “Because what we believe is that with science, with hard work, and with resources, we can continue to protect the American people, from our oldest to our youngest.”
Recall that, in August 2020, Jha referred to Biden’s Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci as a “personal role model.”
“One of the things I really admired about (Fauci) is his ability to communicate effectively to people,” Jha told Brown University’s Brown Daily Herald. “He doesn’t dumb things down.”
“I think it’s really important that public health leaders speak up at a moment like this, especially when there’s so much misinformation out there … it’s particularly important to have credible scientific forces,” Jha added at the time.
The COVID czar’s announcement about the anticipated shots for the youngest children came one day after Pfizer again asked the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to authorize its vaccine for this age group.
Pfizer said its clinical trial data indicates three doses of its vaccine will be needed for the youngest children to achieve 80 percent effectiveness against the omicron variant.
In February, both Pfizer and the FDA backed away from a plan for the drug giant to apply for Emergency Use Authorization of its COVID vaccine for young children under five, citing insufficient data on the effectiveness of a third dose of the vaccine.
When Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., was asked during a press briefing if the data indicated two doses of the vaccine did not provide enough protection, he “did not directly answer.”
“The data that we saw made us realize that we needed to see data from a third dose in the ongoing trial in order to make the determination that we could proceed with doing an authorization,” Marks said.
The New York Times referred to the announcement of the change in plans between the FDA and Pfizer as “a striking reversal.”
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