If Vaccines Don't Stop Transmission, Kids and Families Need Freedom to Choose

Schools and universities nationwide are embarking on a second year of mandated Covid vaccinations. 

Washington, D.C., for example, announced its “No Shot, No School!” program this past summer. It prohibits online learning for students who aren’t vaccinated, and it extends to areas like Ward 8, where 91% of the students are black and only 40% are currently vaccinated. If they do not get vaccinated, they will not have any school to attend.

Local parent Ayo Kimathi reflected, “most black people don’t trust these injections. There’s a general quiet resistance where people don’t want to get this for their children. We’ve heard of Tuskegee.”

Kimathi referred to the US government’s notorious “Tuskegee Study” that began in 1932, focusing on 600 African Americans in Alabama. The subjects were promised free medical care in return for receiving experimental blood treatments, but in reality they were being monitored to see how syphillis developed in their bodies over time. 

Despite that penicillin became the recommended treatment for syphilis in 1947, participants’ doctors were persuaded not to give the subjects treatment so that researchers could observe the disease’s full progression over their lifetimes. Participants died, lost their eyesight, and experienced terrible mental and physical health due to the untreated syphilis, but they were never informed. They passed syphilis on to their wives, children, and grandchildren. Not until 1972, 40 years later, did a whistleblower speak up and was the study ended and made public.

Meanwhile, last week a top Pfizer executive admitted to the EU that the company had never tested vaccines for stopping transmission before rolling them out in 2021.

If the vaccines fail to stop contracting and transmitting Covid, then the grounds for requiring them disappears. Consider: how many of us received the vaccine and have subsequently gotten Covid?

Yet millions of students across the country are still being forced, be it in schools or after school activities, into an intervention that may not make sense, whose longterm impact we do not know, and that appears potentially even fatal to a small number of people.

At Princeton last week, 20-year-old student Misrach Ewunetie was found dead on campus after having been missing for six days. Police said her death did not appear suspicious or criminal, and articles haven’t given a cause of death.

From the sound of it, she may have simply dropped dead. 

That seems incredible, but it’s a fate that seems to be occurring more often now, even among youth.

Last Sunday, high school senior cheerleader Victoria Moody died suddenly from a blood clot. Her sister claimed she was in good health up until that night.

The day before, 15-year-old Euan McNamara “unexpectedly collapsed” and died in a restaurant in city-centre Liverpool.

Two weeks ago, 17-year-old Illinois high schooler Daniel Moshi collapsed and died suddenly while rehearsing for a choir performance. 

Examples like these seem to be more and more common (Indiana University student Jacob Schleinz, IU student Mia Roy, 10-year-old in NYC, 10-year-old in Indiana, list of athletes collapsing and/or dying over the past two years). Israel's Real-Time News reported a 5-fold increase in sudden cardiac and unexplained deaths among FIFA soccer players in 2021, writing that the chief causes of the collapses were heart-related or clotting events.

Were these tragedies caused by the Covid vaccines? We cannot know.

But wariness around a novel medical treatment seems justified. Anyone familiar with thalidomide may agree: the popularly prescribed drug for nausea in pregnant women in the 1950s and 60s was later found to be the cause of severe birth defects in thousands of children.

Florida’s Surgeon General conducted an internal study last month and recommended against Covid vaccinations for males age 18-39, due to an 84% greater risk of cardiac-related death for that group. He extended the recommendation to healthy children of any age.

Sweden, no longer recommends Covid vaccines for healthy children, and Denmark cancelled vaccines for those under 50 while saying that getting Covid is preferred to vaccination.

Meanwhile, in March of this year, 55,000 pages from Pfizer’s clinical trials that it submitted to the FDA for federal approval revealed a list of 1,291 potential side effects (the FDA had asked for this information to be kept private until 2091, but a U.S. District Judge ordered the papers to be made public). Brain stem embolism, cardiac arrest, cardiac failure, myocarditis, and pericarditis were all listed. 

Anthony Fauci warned about the longterm impact of a new vaccine back in 1999: “If you take it and then a year goes by, and everybody’s fine, then you say, ‘OK, now let’s give it to 500 people!’ And then a year goes by, and everything’s fine, and you say, ‘Now let’s give to to 1,000s of people.’ And then you find out that it takes 12 years for all hell to break loose. Then what you have done?”

Amidst these risks and unknowns, we stand with and ask others to join those who are working to remove Covid vaccine mandates in schools, after-school activities, and universities.

The issue must be returned to one of personal choice.