The UK Health Safety Agency (UKHSA) announced last week that it will no longer offer Covid vaccines-19 for children under 12 years old, unless they are in a risk group.
The decision seems to have angered the newspaper The Guardian, which interviewed several doctors who criticized the measure.
“When we know that there is a safe and effective vaccine available, it seems unjustifiable to me,” Professor Christina Pagel, of University College London, told the newspaper, pointing out that deaths from the vaccine Covid-19 are rare.
Why precisely they are not offering Covid vaccines for children it was something the Guardian couldn’t say — apart from the admission that they sometimes cause death — perhaps because the UKHSA’s green explanatory booklet gives too much detail.
It can be assumed that the d This decision comes from the fact that young children are by far the least likely to become seriously ill with Covid, along with government data showing that myocarditis is a serious (but rare) side effect, particularly among the younger sex. masculine.
In any case, the UKHSA decision aligns England with several other European countries — including Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark — that do not offer or recommend mRNA vaccines for children. healthy small ones.
In the United States, on the other hand, some cities are moving in another direction.
In Washington DC, the Mayor Muriel Bowser is embroiled in a battle over her order for all students to be vaccinated against Covid-19 in order to have face-to-face classes in schools , a policy that could have serious implications given that around 40% of black adolescents are not vaccinated.
“Among the impacts of this policy, racial differences in education will certainly increase, given that the vaccination rate for black students from 12 at 19 years is below 19%,” said Janaiha Bennett, Executive Director of the Leadership Foundation Young man, in Newsweek. “And that would be an absolute disaster,” he commented.
Washington DC is one of the few places in the country that requires vaccination against the coronavirus to have classes in elementary schools (it doesn’t happen the same in universities), but there are other examples.
New Orleans, in February, added Covid vaccines to its list of mandatory inoculations for children from the age of five, informs the Washington Post, while New York City requires students to be vaccinated if they want to play sports or participate in other extracurricular activities.
‘Who will decide?’
It’s weird. On the one hand, we have European countries that refuse to give Covid vaccines to young children, even if their parents want to vaccinate them. On the other hand, we have American cities forcing children to get a vaccine that parents might emphatically reject as a prerequisite for going to school (or playing sports).
The Denominator common here is not difficult to see: in both situations, it is government officials who decide what is best for the child. There are interesting parallels in this regard.
In May, I told about the lack of formula for babies and noticed that the New York Times rated the product as one of the most regulated in the United States. The US is not alone in this. European countries also have highly regulated baby milk markets. The somewhat comical result is that almost all brands of baby milk fail European standards, and virtually all EU brands fail American standards.
Who makes the best baby formula, the European Union or the United States? As I said at the time, this is the wrong question.
“The most basic question is not what is best, but who will decide what is best”, reminds us of the economist Thomas Sowell.
The same can be said about vaccines. The question is not whether children or adults should receive Covid vaccines, the question is who will decide . Everywhere you look, governments and bureaucrats are trying to make that decision for others. Some are saying they cannot give mRNA vaccines to children; others are saying that children have to get mRNA vaccines.
It’s bad enough when governments are deciding what kind of baby formula to buy, but you could say it’s worse when governments are deciding whether or not they can get a vaccine that has the power to save and take lives. The foundation of informed consent is that people have information and can then choose or reject treatment. It is one of the bases of medical ethics, but it seems that it was thrown aside during the pandemic.
Why?
Without a doubt , one reason for this is that the pandemic has created a climate of fear, which in turn can create a demand for coercion. But I suspect that the retreat from choice also comes from a broader cultural retreat from capitalism, a system that makes consumers sovereign rather than bureaucrats.
“The real bosses, in capitalist system of the market economy, it is the consumers”, wrote the economist Ludwig von Mises in his book Bureaucracy. “By buying or refraining from buying, they decide who should own the capital and take care of the factories. They determine what must be produced, and in what quantity and quality. Their actions result in profit or loss for the entrepreneur.”
For decades, Americans have slowly and silently, and perhaps inadvertently, embraced another system. In this system, government officials decide which butter is “safe”. Which milk can be bought and consumed. What kind of car is good for the environment and therefore available for purchase.
Instead of adopting a system based on individual choice and mutual exchange, Americans tacitly have adopted a system that allows bureaucrats to decide for them — including who can and cannot (or should) get a life-changing vaccine. (It is noteworthy that we had vaccines since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, but the FDA [Administração de Alimentos e Drogas] banned clinical trials that could have demonstrated their safety and efficacy in a few weeks.)
Around the globe people continue to get into arguments about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. They should seek to answer a different question: who should decide?
Jon Miltimore is managing editor of FEE.org. His texts and reports have appeared in publications such as Time, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News and Star Tribune. Writes for Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist and The Epoch Times.
