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This week, Mary Holland, Children’s Health Defense president, and Polly Tommey, co-producer of “Vaxxed,” cover the latest COVID headlines, including Pfizer’s news about a “single pill home cure” for COVID, a new private-public partnership (riddled with conflicts of interest) to fight the next pandemic and a “ridiculous” New York Times article about what parents should do if they’re vaccinated, but their kids aren’t.
Also in the news this week: enrolling kids in clinical trials, West Virginia is offering $100 savings bonds in exchange for getting vaccinated and Canadian police refuse to make random stops to enforce stay-at-home orders.
Here are some of this week’s highlights:
- Connecticut repealed the religious exemption for vaccines (except for those students who had exemptions on file before April 27), despite nearly 4,000 people showing up to protest. But the law will be challenged because 1. lawmakers can’t pass a mandate based on a “medical emergency” yet allow all those students with exemptions to continue through years of school unvaccinated; and 2. because of the grandfathered exemptions, the state is now not treating all students equally under the law.
- Nature, a prestigious international science journal that produces peer-reviewed studies, ran an editorial by Peter Hotez calling out “anti-vaxxers” as “aggressive, domestic terrorists and advocating tougher action against them. “They’re panicking,” Mary said.
- As predicted, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted to resume the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, with no restrictions and without requiring a label warning about blood clots.
- An opinion piece in the New York Times addressed the growing number of reports of COVID vaccines affecting women’s menstrual cycle. “Amazing that they published that,” said Mary — and be sure to read all the comments under the article.
- Injured by a vaccine? Report it to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, VaxxTracker and Children’s Health Defense, here’s how.
- The Defender reported on a study suggesting the Pfizer vaccine may cause heart inflammation in people under 30, and the New York Post reported COVID vaccines may cause shingles. Mary’s reaction: “How can they continue to say the benefits of these vaccines outweigh the risks — how do they know that?”
- CNBC and The Defender reported on colleges and employers mandating COVID vaccines. “We need an advocacy strategy, along with the legal strategy,” Mary said. CHD has created these downloadable letters for people facing mandates: notice for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) vaccines; notice for EUA testing; and notice for EUA masks.
- Moderna and Pfizer announced their vaccines “are safe during pregnancy,” but even the CDC walked back that claim. “How can you assert something is safe in pregnancy without seeing how the fetus develops over several years?” True mission, market for pharma, no safety testing, no clinical trials,
- In Denmark, 37 people are seeking compensation for side effects suffered after taking the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has since been discontinued in the country.
- India’s health ambassador, a healthy 59-year-old, died one day after receiving a COVID vaccine in a publicly televised event aimed at encouraging others to get vaccinated.
Watch “This Week” with Mary + Polly:
