Florida Rejects COVID Shots For Kids 5-12

By Neenah Payne

States have the right to ignore federal mandates. Nullification As A Growing Form Of Resistance To The Federal Government By U.S. States points out:

“Nullification is a legal doctrine, which argues that states have the ability — and duty — to invalidate national actions they deem unconstitutional. In its most overt manifestation, this form of resistance is used by state leaders to dispute perceived federal overreach and reject federal authority. Less overt forms of the practice involve actions by states to ignore or refuse to implement federal policy initiatives they deem outside the scope of federal authority. Nullification declarations appeared in U.S. political debates as early as the late 1700s, when Thomas Jefferson presented it as a way to preserve the principles of the constitution while states resisted unwanted direction.”

On Monday, March 7, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo of Florida spoke at a roundtable of doctors skeptical of COVID-19 mitigation measures as scores of doctors and scientists tuning in worldwide were shown on a huge wraparound screen behind the panel.

Florida says healthy kids shouldn’t get COVID vaccine, contradicting CDC reports:

“The Florida Department of Health is recommending against giving coronavirus vaccines to healthy children. Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo made the pronouncement at a Monday roundtable discussion on coronavirus mitigations policies moderated by Gov. Ron DeSantis. Ladapo, who leads Florida’s Department of Health, said his department’s recommendation would be the first of its kind in the country.

The announcement came after a 90-minute discussion among 10 doctors and researchers who rejected the benefits of various coronavirus mitigation measures such as vaccine mandates, mask requirements and business and school closures, saying instead those policies only caused harm. 'I think what Florida’s guidance reflects is the latest research,' DeSantis told reporters at a news conference at Plant City later in the day. He said healthy kids are at low risk for the virus and that he’s seen studies showing there’s 'very little benefit' for them.

The Department of Health released a copy of the written recommendation Tuesday. It said that 'healthy children aged 5 to 17 may not benefit from receiving the currently available COVID-19 vaccine,' and that 'there are certain risks to consider that may outweigh benefits among healthy children.'

Monday’s panel event was billed as 'The Curtain Close on COVID Theater,' and was held in a professionally lit studio in West Palm Beach with 10 guest speakers, including doctors and researchers from around the country. Among them were three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a highly controversial document that recommended against lockdowns because of what they said were 'devastating' public health consequences.”

GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS: THE CURTAIN CLOSE ON COVID THEATER (FULL EVENT)

“On a floor-to-ceiling screen behind the panelists were square tiles with video feeds of attendees, many of whom were staffers at various government agencies in the DeSantis administration, including the Department of Children and Families, the Department of Economic Opportunity, the Department of Juvenile Justice and others.

Panelists touched on several themes championed by DeSantis, including what speakers called the 'censorship' of doctors who dissent from the mainstream coronavirus guidance. Some accused the CDC and other government agencies of becoming politicized or of working with media outlets to buy 'surreptitious advertising' promoting vaccines.

Robert Malone, a vaccine researcher who has become a vocal proponent of the anti-vaccine movement during the pandemic, said the 'deep state' has kept doctors from using 'repurposed drugs' like hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. Numerous studies have found that drug has no clinical benefit in fighting the virus….

Another speaker, Joseph Fraiman, an emergency room doctor in Louisiana, said the 'severe' side-effects of the vaccines compared to the mild symptoms caused by the coronavirus in children means there’s no 'clear benefit.' 'If you have a healthy child, the chances of that child dying are incredibly low, essentially close to zero if not actually zero,' he said. Fraiman then bashed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for not doing enough research on the coronavirus vaccine, saying it’s left a vacuum of information. 'We have no idea if vaccines reduce transmission in kids or in adults,' he said.”

Dr. Joseph Mercola’s 3/18/22 article Roundtable Discussion on COVID Treatments and Mandates will be moved to his Substack account after 48 hours for political reasons. It points out:

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“March 7, 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis hosted a roundtable discussion about COVID treatment, early treatment suppression, vaccine risks, the collateral damage from school closures and lockdowns and more.

March 8, 2022, the Florida Department of Health updated its guidance, formally recommending against COVID vaccination for healthy children, 5 to 17. Florida is the first state to go against CDC vaccine recommendations.

Panelists included physicians, scientists, and academics from around the U.S., including:

1. Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, a former National Institutes of Health-funded researcher
2. Robert Malone, a molecular virologist, bioethicist, vaccine researcher and co-developer of the mRNA vaccine platform
3. Tracy Hoeg, Ph.D., an epidemiologist
4. Jill Ackerman, a family physician
5. Christopher D’Adamo, Ph.D., an epidemiologist and integrative medicine specialist
6. Shveta Raju, an internist
7. Harvey Risch, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology trained in mathematical modeling of infectious diseases
8. Jay Bhattacharya, Ph.D., professor of health policy at Stanford, research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which calls for focused protection of the most vulnerable
9. Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., former professor of medicine at Harvard University, now senior scientific director of the Brownstone Institute, a biostatistician and epidemiologist with expertise in vaccine safety evaluation, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration
10. Joseph Fraiman, a rural emergency physician and clinical scientist, specializing in harm-benefit analysis
11. Sunetra Gupta, Ph.D., Oxford University professor, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development and mathematical modeling of infectious disease, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration

“According to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the most egregious mistakes made was to ignore the fact that there’s a thousand-fold difference in risk between the lowest and highest risk groups. Children are at virtually no risk of dying from COVID, yet children have been forced to bear the burden of disease prevention. “Almost from the very beginning of the pandemic, we adopted policies that seem like they were tailor-made to harm children,” he said.

According to Dr. Sunetra Gupta, decision makers chose to do the very things we knew, for certain, would cause harm. They inverted the precautionary principle to minimize harm, and chose to maximize harm instead.”

We Must Hold Decision Makers to Account

As noted by Ladapo, one of the things we must remember and remain intent upon as we move forward is to hold people accountable for their public health decisions. Two years after the “two weeks to slow the spread,” we have ample evidence proving the decision makers “didn’t know what they were talking about,” Ladapo says.

They abused their power, they manipulated data, they lied, and they now want us all to forget what they said and did. We cannot let them get away with it. Many errors were made, and those responsible must be held to account. “Their choices, that they made for everyone, were the wrong choices that led to, basically, no appreciable benefit,” Ladapo says. “We cannot let them forget. We have to hold them accountable. We have to let the country, the world, know what the truth is — because it’s the right thing to do, and because it can happen again if we don’t.”

Stunning Denials of Science

Kulldorff, in his opening remarks, points out what he believes is one of the most stunning parts of this pandemic, and that is the denial of the basic science of natural immunity. Even doctors and hospitals that “should know better have demanded vaccine mandates for people who have already had COVID,” he says.

Perhaps even worse, hospitals have fired staff who have had COVID and have natural immunity, simply because they did not want to get the experimental jab. Those with natural immunity are not just less likely to get COVID again, they’re also far less likely to spread it to others. This makes them among the most valuable staff members a hospital can have, yet they were routinely discarded.

“That goes against basic principles of public health,” Kulldorff says. “And to have a director of the CDC who questions natural immunity, which we have now, is sort of like having a director of NASA who questions whether the earth is flat or round. It’s just mindboggling that we’ve come into a situation like that.”

Fraiman, whose clinical research expertise includes risk-benefit analysis, also expresses disbelief and frustration over the scientific censorship we’ve seen in the last two years. He points out that many of his colleagues are simply too afraid of getting fired to speak the truth.

DeSantis, similarly, highlights how incredibly difficult it has been to publish and find research that contradicted the official narrative, and even when available, the mainstream media would refuse to acknowledge it, whereas they would endlessly publicize speculation and statements of opinion that had no basis in fact or science, but supported — however flimsily — the official narrative.

I would add that so-called fact checkers have even gone so far as to “fact check” scientific peer-reviewed publications, labeling them as “misinformation” or outright “false,” resulting in their being censored on social media!

The Inversion of the Precautionary Principle

Gupta, who has some 30 years of expertise in mathematical modeling of infectious disease, points out that “The powers that be told us the measures and restrictions would work, but we didn’t know they would work,” she says. “It was a rather incoherent set of goals,” she says. “One thing we knew for certain was that lockdowns and other restrictions would have enormous cost, yet that’s what we went ahead and did. We inverted the precautionary principle of trying to minimize harm, by doing the one thing we knew would cause harm.”

I would add that the scale of that harm was never calculated or addressed at any point along the way. It’s as though it didn’t matter how great the harm was, as long as there was the appearance that we were doing everything in our power to prevent COVID.

The Collateral Damage Has Been Immense

As noted by Fraiman, any time you consider a public health measure, you have to conduct a thorough risk-benefit analysis. What are the harms, who will be harmed the most, what’s the extent of the collateral damage? Do the benefits outweigh all of the risks?

In the case of school closures, “the collateral damage has been immense,” Fraiman says. According to Fraiman, there’s been a doubling of obesity and diabetes, for example, during the pandemic. There’s been a dramatic increase in anxiety, depression and stress. Recent statistics show a shocking spike in fentanyl overdose deaths among high school-aged adolescents in the U.S. during 2020 and 2021.

The following graph, from a December 24, 2021, preprint article posted on medRxiv and tweeted out by Dr. John B., a scientist, illustrates the situation better than words.

According to the authors:

“Adolescent overdose mortality saw a sharp increase between 2019 and 2020, from 2.35 per 100,000 to 4.58 per 100,000, representing a 94.3% increase, the largest percent increase of any 5-year age group ... Trends were driven by fatalities involving IMFs [illicitly-manufactured-fentanyls], which nearly tripled from 2019 to 2020, and represented 76.6% of adolescent overdose deaths in 2021 ... Our results should also be understood in the context of rising rates of adolescent mental illness during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

“I think it’s quite clear that the collateral damage outweighed any benefit that was there,” Fraiman says. “So, I think we need to take a more systems-level approach before embarking on this kind of policy the next time.”

Florida Recommends Against COVID Shots for Healthy Children

In late February 2022, Ladapo and DeSantis also updated the state’s policy on masks, formally discouraging mask wearing. Toward the end of the roundtable, Ladapo announced the Florida Department of Health would also formally recommend against COVID shots for healthy children, aged 5 to 17, as they “may not benefit from receiving the currently available COVID-19 vaccines.”

During the roundtable, risks such as myocarditis were also discussed. Florida is the first state to go against the CDC’s vaccine recommendations. In a statement published with the new guideline, March 8, 2022, Ladapo said: “Based on currently available data, the risks of administering COVID-19 vaccination among healthy children may outweigh the benefits. These decisions should be made on an individual basis, and never mandated.””

Florida Surgeon General Breaks With CDC, Recommends Against COVID Shots for Healthy Kids

Florida’s surgeon general on Monday said he will recommend against COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children, making Florida the first state to break with official guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He made the announcement at a 90-minute roundtable hosted by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

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Dr. Robert Malone Speaks Out to Save Children

Dr. Robert Malone is the inventor of the mRNA and DNA vaccine core platform technology used in the Pfizer and Moderna COVID shots. He is the President of the Global COVID Summit of 17,000 doctors.

16,000 Physicians and Scientists Agree Kids Shouldn’t Get COVID Vaccine | By Robert W. Malone, M.D.

Dr. Malone called COVID-19 injection mandates “completely unjustified” for children and recommends that youths who have received COVID-19 injections have their hearts checked for damage given the risk of myocarditis and heart damage. A bill was introduced in California to allow 12-year-olds to consent to COVID-19 shots. Dr. Malone says:

“We’ve allowed the government to insert itself into the family, and that has got to stop….They’re seeking to create a situation in which children are … subjected to coercion to take an unlicensed medical product they don’t need because they are not at risk from the disease.”

Candace Owens With Dr. Robert Malone Part 1 (video) and Part 2 (video)

Judge Stops Vaccination of Kids w/o Parental Consent in DC

Alabama, Oregon, South Carolina, North Carolina and Rhode Island passed laws to give doctors the power to persuade children 14-16 years old to get COVID vaccine without telling their parents.

A U.S. District Court judge issued a ruling on 3/18 protecting minor children from vaccination without parental consent.

Del Bigtree, host of The Highwire, uses the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) to file lawsuits. Del announced on 3/19:

“In a HUGE win for parents in D.C. and beyond, a federal court for the District of Columbia just granted a preliminary injunction in a case funded by ICAN, and another case, that challenged D.C.’s law allowing doctors to vaccinate children 11 years of age and older without parental knowledge or consent. The Court explained that 'Children will be unable to decide to get vaccinations without their parents’ consent!' This is a huge win for the rights of parents to raise their children!"

Top image: Tampa Bay Times

Research contributions from Elba Cornier

Neenah Payne writes for Activist Post and Natural Blaze

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