Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free.
Dr. Liz Mumper joined host Brian Hooker, Ph.D., on CHD.TV’s “Doctors & Scientists” to discuss the COVID-19 vaccine and its risks for children.
Mumper is a pediatrician and former medical director of the Autism Research Institute.
Mumper and Hooker agreed fear-mongering — by medical groups, government agencies and the media — has blurred the truth and the data on COVID, and made critical thinking difficult.
“As scientists and physicians, we should be really trying to cut through that and look at the actual data, which I think is much more reassuring,” Mumper said.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the COVID vaccine for children as young as 5.
Mumper is concerned parents don’t realize these vaccines are still under EUA for children.
She also is concerned the goal is to get the COVID vaccine on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) childhood immunization schedule.
“I think children do not need these vaccines — and do not need them on the regular schedule,” she said.
A majority of children have already had COVID, Mumper said, and children typically have very mild symptoms. Many are completely asymptomatic.
Also, according to Mumper, natural immunity provides broader and more durable protection for children than do the vaccines — and children who had COVID not only don’t need the vaccine, they also may be at a higher risk of adverse effects from it.
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), shows 96 deaths among 5- to 17-year-olds reported following COVID vaccines.
Due to underreporting, she and Hooker agreed, these deaths could be multiplied “by a factor of around 40, to get the number of kids that may have actually died.”
The CDC failed to record the number of deaths in children from COVID itself, Mumper pointed out, saying, “We’re batting against the air here.”
Hooker agreed. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with, but we know that the prevailing data show that this is a mild infection in childhood and the survival rate is 99.98%,” he said.
Mumper said most of the children who died from the vaccine were presumably healthy.
“If you’ve got a condition [COVID] where the vast majority of kids are going to do great with it, and it has such a high survival rate, you better be sure kids aren’t dying because of a vaccine,” she said.
Mumper and Hooker also took a critical look at the FDA’s risk-benefit analysis for the COVID vaccines, and found several inconsistencies.
Mumper showed the FDA did not take natural immunity into consideration in its analysis, and also “dangerously” underestimated the risk of myocarditis.
Hooker noted that 50% effectiveness has always been the standard for the FDA to grant EUA. To extend the EUA, the FDA lowered the confidence level to 30%. However, 6 to 7 weeks after receiving the injection, the efficacy is down to 12%.
“There’s no reason to take it, it’s all downside, there’s no upside, and again, we have to question this,” Hooker said.
“There is no golden rule in terms of ‘we can’t question the science.’ Science is questioning itself.”
Hooker and Mumper discussed the importance of getting involved and fighting bad legislation.
One bill, SB-871 in California, would require the COVID vaccine for school attendance. Other states are also doing this. “It’s important we fight these bad bills and get on the bandwagon,” Hooker said.
Mumper recommended people educate legislators by letting them know the jabs were developed on the basis of the initial strains of the virus, and that children continue to do well as the virus evolves into new strains.
“New strains are more infectious but not as serious,” she said.
It comes back to “First do no harm,” she said. “If kids don’t need the vaccines, we do not want to give them the vaccines because we do not have long-term studies on the side effects, and the short-term information we have is actually quite a bit concerning to me.”
Mumper believes many people were led to get vaccinated because they don’t understand the concept of absolute risk.
In the first six months of the COVID vaccine rollout, she pointed out, the adverse events reported to VAERS surpassed all reports for all vaccines combined over the past 30 years.
Among 5- to 11-year-olds, 88% of adverse events reported to VAERS occurred within 24 hours of receiving the COVID vaccine, Mumper said.
The two also addressed fear-mongering by the media, including media claims that the unvaccinated are to blame for people becoming sick with COVID and dying — even though studies show the vaccinated have large viral loads in their noses and throats when they get sick with COVID.
“Nobody is considering that if we let children get these less-virulent variants, they could be part of our herd immunity and they could be our way out of this pandemic,” Mumper said.
Watch the full episode here:
