Horowitz: The indefensible rush to experiment on children

Riddle me this: If the COVID vaccine for adults is so impervious and miraculous that it justifies emergency and immediate use for children after just a few months of trials, then, by definition, there is no need for children to take the vaccine. It can only potentially cause harm, since the virus doesn't affect them, when we already know that any adult has had access to the vaccine for quite some time. If it really works, there should be no concern of unvaccinated children spreading it to vaccinated adults, especially when children's transmission rates are so low to begin with. So what is motivating this frantic rush to experiment on children?

Nobody can justify an emergency use authorization for a novel mRNA vaccine on children because the risks far outweigh any potential benefits. Even if we are to trust Pfizer's own trial data (p. 27) and allow the foxes of profit to guard the academic henhouse, there is a 1-in-333 risk for a serious adverse event (SEA) from the vaccine. Their trial resulted in 5 SEAs out of 1,127 12- to 15-year-olds in the vaccine group, as opposed to 1 in the 1,127 of the placebo group. That was the number of serious adverse events in just 30 days. If this excess absolute risk of 0.003 (0.3%) for SAEs holds up, that means for each 333 children 12-15 years old who are vaccinated, there would be one serious adverse event.

One in 333 doesn't sound like a lot, but it's a lot more than zero, and it's their own biased data. Plus, we have zero trials longer than just one month, so we have no idea about the long-term effects.

So, what are the benefits? There is no data on children, but we know from Israeli data on the Pfizer vaccine for adults published in the New England Journal of Medicine (p.22), that the "needed to treat" number of vaccines to save a life from COVID is 27,778. Their study showed 19 fewer deaths in the vaccine group over the placebo group out of 526,877 people. That is 1/0.00036, which is 27,778.

As Dr. Andy Bostom of Brown University points out, if children 12-15, on average, suffer a serious adverse event every 333 doses, that would add up to about 84 SAEs before you get to one life saved at roughly 27,700 doses.