Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free.

CDC Approves COVID Vaccines for Youngest Kids

NBC News reported:

On Saturday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky signed off on COVID vaccines for the youngest Americans. Her endorsement means shots can begin immediately, finally ending the two-and-a-half-year wait on the part of parents of children under 5.

Walenksy accepted the recommendation within hours after the CDC advisory committee voted unanimously in favor of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines for children as young as 6 months.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee on Saturday endorsed Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines for the youngest children, the last step before CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky could issue her final sign-off.

The unanimous recommendations from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices followed the Food and Drug Administration’s authorization of the shots on Friday.

White House Health Official Makes False Claim About COVID Vaccines

The Epoch Times reported:

A White House official made a false claim on June 20 about COVID-19 vaccines while encouraging parents to get their young children vaccinated. Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator, said that “there have not been any serious side effects of these vaccines.”

Contrary to Jha’s claim, severe allergic reactions, blood clotting, heart inflammation and paralysis are among the serious side effects linked to the three COVID-19 vaccines that are available in the United States.

“There is a well-documented risk of myocarditis from the COVID vaccine, especially in young men and adolescent boys, and an elevated risk of clotting in young women with the Moderna vaccine,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, told The Epoch Times in an email. “It’s not right for government scientific advisers to downplay documented risks of the vaccine because it ultimately undermines confidence in public health.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Says White House Lying About COVID Vaccine Policy

Fox News reported:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday said the White House lied about his state’s COVID-19 vaccine policy changes and that the media has largely chosen to ignore it.

The Republican was in Callahan, just north of Jacksonville, when he was asked about a debate on vaccines that occurred Friday and comments from the Biden administration last week that he had changed course and was ordering vaccines for young children.

“We are not going to have any programs where we’re trying to jab 6-month-old babies with mRNA,” he added. “That’s just the reality. I think what they thought would happen was that we’d be embarrassed about it.”

On Friday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that Florida had reversed course and is allowing healthcare providers to order the mRNA vaccines for children under six months to 5 years of age.

On Monday, DeSantis said the state would not be ordering any mRNA vaccines for children.

Study CDC Cited in Arguing for COVID Vaccines for Babies Being Updated

The Epoch Times reported:

A non-peer-reviewed study that U.S. government scientists cited in asserting COVID-19 is a leading cause of death for children is being updated after inaccuracies were detected.

The preprint paper, published in May, says that COVID-19 has been the fifth-leading cause of death during the pandemic for children aged 1 to 5. The authors, primarily British scientists, also concluded that COVID-19 has been a top cause of death for all children. But the paper has flaws, Seth Flaxman, a professor in Oxford University’s Department of Computer Science, and one of the authors, acknowledged on Twitter on June 19.

The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, the source for the paper, separates deaths with COVID-19 as the underlying cause from deaths as a contributing, but not the, cause.

The paper said that only deaths where COVID-19 was “the underlying cause of death” were counted. But the authors listed 1,433 deaths among those aged 0 to 19. There were actually just 1,088 deaths, according to an Epoch Times review of the data in a CDC database called WONDER.

Biden to Visit DC Clinic Following Approval of COVID Shots for Kids Under 5

NBC News reported:

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will visit a COVID vaccination clinic in Washington, DC, on Tuesday afternoon to highlight the recent approval of the shots for children under age 5.

Following the visit, Biden will deliver remarks at the White House about the long-awaited milestone.

In a statement after the announcement, Biden said it was a “monumental step forward in our nation’s fight against the virus, with virtually every American now eligible for the protections that COVID-19 vaccines provide.”

WHO’s Tedros Privately Admits Lab Leak ‘Most Likely Explanation’ for COVID

ZeroHedge reported:

The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who spent the early months of the pandemic publicly kowtowing to China, has privately admitted that he thinks COVID-19 escaped from a Chinese laboratory in a “catastrophic accident,” according to the Daily Mail, citing a senior Government source.

The WHO came under heavy fire early into the pandemic for praising China’s “transparent” response to the pandemic, repeating misinformation from Beijing about human-to-human transmission, and bowing to pressure from Chinese President Xi Jinping not to declare the COVID-19 outbreak an emergency.

Yet, while initially promoting the natural origin theory, Tedros and the WHO have become far more ‘open’ to the lab leak theory — despite officially being on the fence, unlike Tedros.

Some Omicron Sub-Variants Escaping Antibodies From Sinopharm Shot, Chinese Study Says

Reuters reported:

A small Chinese study detailed in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal showed neutralizing antibodies against some Omicron sub-variants were largely undetectable after two doses of a Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine, with a booster shot only partly restoring them.

The study comes as China, which has approved only locally developed COVID shots including the Sinopharm vaccine, strives to improve vaccination rates, maintaining a “dynamic zero-COVID” policy aimed at eradicating all outbreaks while many countries have adopted an approach of learning to live with the virus.

The vaccine, BBIBP-CorV, is one of the two Sinopharm COVID shots approved for use in China and is also the main shot that the state-owned firm has exported.

Contagious Vaccines: A Warning

The Epoch Times reported:

For two decades, scientists have been quietly developing self-spreading contagious vaccines. The National Institutes of Health funded this research, in which either DNA from a deadly pathogen is packaged in a contagious but less harmful virus, or the deadly virus’s lethality is weakened by engineering it in a lab.

The resultant “vaccines” spread from one person to the next just like a contagious respiratory virus. Only 5% of regional populations would need to be immunized; the other 95% would “catch” the vaccine as it spreads person-to-person through community transmission.

This technology bypasses the inconvenience of recalcitrant citizens who may refuse to give consent. Its advocates highlight that a mass vaccination campaign that would ordinarily take months of expensive effort to immunize everyone could be shortened to only a few weeks.

In the wake of the COVID pandemic, about a dozen research institutions in the United States, Europe and Australia are investigating the potential human uses for self-spreading vaccines. The federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, for example, is examining this technology for the U.S. military to protect against the West African Lassa fever, a virus spread by rats to humans. This project, it should be noted, doesn’t require the consent of our military service men and women.

COVID Vaccines for Australian Children Aged 6 Months to 5 Years May Be Approved in Weeks

The Guardian reported:

Australian children aged five and under could be in line to receive a COVID-19 vaccination within a matter of weeks, the federal government has confirmed, as tests begin on a combined shot for flu and coronavirus.

The health minister, Mark Butler, said the Therapeutic Goods Administration was considering an application from the drug maker Moderna to allow its vaccines to be given to children aged from six months to five years old.

Australians will have access to a single vaccine for COVID-19, influenza and the respiratory virus RSV by 2024, Moderna has announced. The company’s chief medical officer, Dr. Paul Burton, said the combined shot was in the early testing stages, with trials to start later this year.

Women More Susceptible Than Men to Long COVID

U.S. News & World Report reported:

Women are far more likely than men to suffer from long COVID, according to a broad new research review.

The review, published June 21 in the journal Current Medical Research and Opinion, included 1.3 million patients and revealed women were 22% more likely to develop persistent symptoms after a COVID infection.

For women, lingering symptoms after a COVID infection included fatigue; ear, nose and throat issues; as well as mood disorders like depression. They also had respiratory symptoms, and neurological, skin, gastrointestinal and rheumatic disorders. In contrast, men with long COVID were more likely to have endocrine disorders, including diabetes and kidney issues.

Led by Shirley Sylvester, senior medical director for women’s health at Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick, N.J., the researchers noted that differences in how men’s and women’s immune systems function could be an important factor.