Should we be vaccinating children against Covid? Should we be vaccinating healthy people at all?
Without doubt vaccination has been an amazing breakthrough for vulnerable people – those in whom a combination of age and underlying chronic health problems makes them unable to mount a quick and effective immune response to the virus.
It is estimated that 18m (66%) of people over 69 fall into this ‘vulnerable’ category: but 34% do not, so age on its own is not necessarily a sufficient indicator. What’s more, a further 18m vulnerable people are under 69 and in their case vulnerability is due to chronic diseases which render them as vulnerable as those who are older.
The role of underlying chronic ill-health of the vast majority of people who have died from Covid is stark. Indeed researchers at the University of Copenhagen using AI software have been able to predict 90% of fatalities just from a person’s age, BMI and medical records – and the results show that it’s the chronic health issues that play the key role. The few outlying cases where supposedly healthy people have died, indicates only that the reason for their underlying susceptibility has not been identified. (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2021/03/17/computer-can-predict-will-die-90pc-accuracy/ )
So, whilst vaccination is an important weapon in the fight against Covid, is blanket immunisation for all young or healthy people really the way forward? In the vast majority of cases, they will have mild or undetectable symptoms and they will usually recover within a week, having acquired some level of immunity against future infection.
“Retrospective studies of other vaccines have found that it can take up to ten years to properly recognise the extent of any vaccine’s side effects.”
Indeed, at a recent meeting of the all-party parliamentary group on Covid, Dr Ruchi Sinha said that “choosing not to vaccinate children would be unlikely to cause problems in the health service” and that “children who contract severe symptoms tend to be only those who have got comorbidities, such as obesity, or severe neurological problems”.
Echoing this advice, Sage member, Professor Andrew Hayward, then came out to also say that we should now “target the most vulnerable rather than continuing with disruptive measures”.
And if the vaccination of children against Covid is being questioned, perhaps we also need to take the admission one step further and admit that children and healthy people are being vaccinated, not for themselves for the good of other more vulnerable people.
Further, if experts are now admitting that the benefits of vaccinating healthy children does not outweigh the risks, then logic says that vaccinating truly healthy adults does not outweigh the risks either. After all, in today’s world, some adults are healthier than some children.
For governments and many vaccine supporters, they might consider it the public duty of the young and ‘well’ to protect the vulnerable, but this is only if vaccinating them stops transmission, which we now know it does in only a limited way. For healthy individuals this therefore means them taking a personal risk that they will not only avoid the potentially serious and known immediate side effects, but also the unknown long-term side effects too.
Retrospective studies of other vaccines have found that it can take up to ten years to properly recognise the extent of any vaccine’s side effects. It is likely, therefore, that the growing range of ‘known’ side effects of the group of Covid vaccines are being greatly under-reported and under-estimated.
It is known for instance, that the reporting system for side-effects from other existing vaccines, only captures a limited number of cases, mainly because doctors are prone to overlooking or dismissing them and the hurdles that need to be jumped and the time it takes to have a side effect officially recognised, can be onerous.
Most of the currently acknowledged side effects were not detected in trials, they were flagged up by a few eagle-eyed clinicians in real life settings who noticed unusual increases in certain medical conditions.
With at least six major side effects already documented and hundreds of previously healthy people now suffering and even dying from them, those healthy people who are unlikely to gain personal benefit from a vaccine should surely be made aware of this emerging picture.
Early on in the vaccine debate, the Great Barrington Declaration, issued by a host of infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists said that they had “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies. So far, their declaration has been signed by 850,000 clinicians and other people. (https://gbdeclaration.org/ )
More recently another group of scientists and doctors have issued an open letter calling on the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to answer urgent safety questions regarding COVID-19 vaccines, or withdraw the vaccines’ authorisation. They say that "There are serious concerns that the approval of the COVID-19 vaccines by the EMA was premature".
The letter describes serious potential consequences of COVID-19 vaccine technology, warning of possible autoimmune reactions, blood clotting abnormalities, stroke and internal bleeding, “including in the brain, spinal cord and heart”. The authors request evidence that each medical danger outlined “was excluded in pre-clinical animal models with all three vaccines prior to their approval for use in humans by the EMA.” (https://doctors4covidethics.medium.com/urgent-open-letter-from-doctors-and-scientists-to-the-european-medicines-agency-regarding-covid-19-f6e17c311595)
A good summary of the on-going worries from doctors and scientists about the safety of vaccines can be found here: https://www.totalhealth.co.uk/blog/increasing-concern-over-whether-covid-19-vaccines-are-safe)
It is also important that healthy people consider that some or all of the mechanisms that throw up vaccine side-effects are also mechanisms that may well be triggered in a great many more vaccinated people, but the symptoms may either go unrecognised or fail to reach clinical levels. These sub-clinical effects, which seem to mainly relate to the heart, circulatory and immune systems, may not result in a hospital visit, but they may remain a challenge to a person’s body for an unknown period of time.
Research findings of unusual effects of the mRNA vaccines on people’s wider immune systems and unknown future interactions with other vaccines and medications, should in themselves be enough for truly healthy people to think carefully about their decision.
In the last week of June for instance, the ONS reported 1,029 more deaths than normal, but only 389 of those involved Covid and this comes at a time when many vulnerable people are still shielding and so excess deaths should theoretically be lower. Further data from Public Health England show weekly heart deaths are currently well in excess of usual levels, with more than 500 extra deaths registered from heart failure, heart disease or circulatory disease for the week ending July 23 (the types of problems that could theoretically be related to vaccination). This may of course be from other factors, but whether vaccinations have any part to play in this rise in heart-related deaths and whether there are now increasing cases of heart-related illness in the general community should surely be investigated.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that vaccination is wrong. For vulnerable people the benefits greatly outweigh the risks, but it is a gamble for healthy people, albeit perhaps a small one, and the overwhelming message should now be that each individual should be allowed to make the decision for themselves without fear or intimidation.
But how do you know if you are vulnerable? Certainly, we know that that many people greatly over-estimate their own health. Just because they have no obviously noticeable health symptoms, they may erroneously feel that they are indeed healthy. It is therefore hardly surprising that some people who decline vaccination may have over-estimated their resilience and may end up in hospital.
No-one who is overweight, underweight, has signs of chronic changes in their bodies or has a chronic issue that’s controlled by medication can consider themselves healthy, and that includes children. It is unfortunately true that some children already have unhealthy bodies, such that Covid-19 might be a danger to them, but these vulnerable children can and have been identified and their numbers are thankfully small.
Before Covid, myself and a number of practitioners at the Light Centres, conducted holistic health screening on customers, to assess not only whether they had signs of any current health problems, but also to assess how well they were doing against their potential and whether they could consider themselves truly healthy. Needless to say, most were surprised that they were already showing signs of chronic physical, biological and mental health issues that they had not yet recognised. We were then able to put them on holistic lifestyle improvement programmes to improve these signs.
Given that some people can’t necessarily be relied on to assess their own vulnerability, it is perhaps unsurprising that governments all over the world have been attempting to vaccinate their entire populations. But in doing so, they are considering their populations as a whole and are not concerned with or able to identify individual susceptibility.
For governments around the world to effectively force healthy people into taking the vaccine by denying them access to some public services and group events will inevitably seem heavy handed to those who aren’t vulnerable to the disease, especially considering the new admissions by Prof Andrew Pollard, who led the Oxford vaccine team, that herd immunity from vaccination is now “mythology”.
Governments may continue to think that their reasons are strong and pressing, but simply side-lining unvaccinated people’s legitimate concerns will inevitably lead to a growing feeling of anger and resentment in those who have understandable doubts.
Furthermore, by dividing the population into those who need to be vaccinated / support vaccination and those who do not need it or are legitimately cautious about it, governments are risking creating a new form of divisiveness with all the serious risks that go with that. The growing level of negative energy that their divisive policies create will have to go somewhere. It will either be let out in growing public protests and dissent or it will be internalised by individuals who have no outlet for their feelings, an internalisation of stress that will almost certainly lead to them acquiring new mental and physical health issues of their own.
The obvious question that will be levied by those who support mass vaccination will be “but what other way can we go about it”?
To a person who works in the ‘health’ rather than the ‘disease’ industry the answer seems clear. Whilst vulnerable and elderly people should always have been shielded from the virus, governments have now had a year and a half to work on reducing the vulnerability of the rest of the population; by encouraging better lifestyles and therefore better health.
Instead, governments have mostly ignored this obvious approach and by imposing lock downs and by restricting the lives of their entire populations, people’s lifestyles have become even worse as their mental and physical health has worsened.
Such an approach has simply created a more vulnerable population with effects and scars that will almost certainly last way beyond the current epidemic.
If the Government had mounted an effective ‘get healthy’ campaign and put its resources into better identifying and protecting vulnerable people, the death count might have been much smaller than the stated numbers. Furthermore, if it had focussed its efforts on just identifying and vaccinating vulnerable people and at the same time opened society for everyone else, it may have avoided the uncalculatable amount of indirect harm now starting to emerge and wouldn’t be faced with the prospect of a stressed and in some places enraged population, many of whom might never trust them again.
An obvious retort may be that opening society overwhelms the health service, but whilst this may have been true in the first wave, better shielding and avoiding hospital infections of already vulnerable people may have done more to reduce the burden on the NHS than locking everyone down, and once vulnerable people have been vaccinated, letting everyone else catch the virus in their own time (as is now being suggested by some experts), may be a more balanced way of controlling the situation.
This is of course, still open to debate, but because of the government’s narrow approach and censorship of alternative facts and ideas, it is not a debate that we’ve yet been allowed to have.
Never before have individuals been asked to make such a complicated and confusing decision about their own personal health, but at least now there is starting to be a little more balanced information for them to base their decision on.
Through the Covid period we have had to put our holistic health screening and lifestyle improvements programmes on hold, but we are now in the process of reviving them with a new and improved screening process run by medical doctors and a new emphasis on the type of lifestyle issues that are now more prevalent.
If you’d like to properly assess your vulnerability and see whether you are on the road to the typical chronic ill-health issues, then email me at mark@lightcentre.com and I will let you know as soon as the service is available again. Screening will probably cost no more than £100 and the lifestyle programmes will involve 3 or 4 one-hour sessions with your GHP over a 12-week period, costing around £60 per session.
Comments