Medical Science: COVID-19 - Should You Rush to Inject Your Toddler

As Americans diligently work to flatten the pandemic spread curve, the recent federal advisory committee authorizing COVID vaccines for toddlers and infants as young as six months old has many parents relieved that their babies can be vaccinated.

The federal advisory committee considering the shots voted 22 to zero to recommend Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for both Pfizer and Moderna injections for children at least 6 months old, and FDA and CDC approved them with lightning speed. Thus, the shots that the federal government already bought and paid for won’t have to be wasted.


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The shots only have an EUA, not FDA approval, and you will need to sign a consent form. Some data you might like to consider: As of May, there had been 60,442 adverse events involving liver damage reported to the FDA’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), including 204 in children under age 12. Some involved death or need for a liver transplant.

Evidently, children under age 12 were being given unauthorized shots.

Observers of the hearings pointed out:

The trials in young children enrolled 4,500 subjects, but 3,000 (67%) dropped out.

No actual health benefits were shown, so they used “immunobridging”—comparing antibody response to that of older subjects in a previous trial. A number of experts said that antibody response did not correlate well with immunity, especially against the new variants.


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Committee members received risk: benefit documents (190 single-spaced pages) at most two days before the meeting, so they did not have adequate time to study them.

By fall of 2021, 26 high-quality studies from outside the U.S. showed a two- to seven-fold increased risk of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart) from mRNA shots.

While the shots are “free,” children and their parents will pay the costs of any adverse reactions.

Parents need to do due diligence. In particular, they need to be alert to mild symptoms that could warn of myocarditis. Doctors need to have a “high index of suspicion” for checking blood troponin levels and other indicators of heart damage to allow early diagnosis and treatment.


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Jane M. Orient, M.D. obtained her undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Arizona in Tucson, and her M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1974. She completed an internal medicine residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital and University of Arizona Affiliated Hospitals and then became an Instructor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and a staff physician at the Tucson Veterans Administration Hospital. She has been in solo private practice since 1981 and has served as Executive Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) since 1989.


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She is currently president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. She is the author of YOUR Doctor Is Not In: Healthy Skepticism about National Healthcare, and the second through fifth editions of Sapira's Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis published by Wolters Kluwer. She authored books for school children, Professor Klugimkopf's Old-Fashioned English Grammar and Professor Klugimkopf's Spelling Method, published by Robinson Books, and coauthored two novels published as Kindle books, Neomorts and Moonshine. 

More than 100 of her papers have been published in the scientific and popular literature on a variety of subjects including risk assessment, natural and technological hazards and non-hazards, and medical economics and ethics. She is the editor of AAPS News, the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter, and Civil Defense Perspectives, and is the managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

If you would like to discuss these issues, contact me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Jane M. Orient, M.D., Executive Director, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.

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