12-year-olds to be vaccinated without parental consent in San Francisco

[Stone]

12-year-olds to be vaccinated without parental consent in San Francisco

The coronavirus vaccines are not fully approved by the FDA, but merely granted emergency use authorization.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 4, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — In a health order released April 28, 2021, the City of San Francisco officially allowed children as young as 12 to take the coronavirus vaccine without parental notification or consent.

The health order was issued even though the vaccines have not been fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but are merely given an emergency use authorization.

Indeed, the order argues that “In the coming months, not only is it likely that the authorization for such vaccines will be expanded (both in terms of the numbers of vaccines but also in terms of non-emergency approval), but it is also likely that the age range of those who are authorized to receive the vaccine in the United States will be expanded to allow for more minors to receive the vaccine.”

The document urged that “although many people have received the COVID-19 vaccines, it is critical from a public health perspective that as many people as possible, including minors, receive the vaccine.”

The San Francisco Department of Health justified this decision by referring to prior cases that allowed for children to give their own consent: “This ability to consent is similar to the concept used elsewhere in state law that minors 12 years old or older may consent to the diagnosis or treatment of infectious diseases, including specifically COVID-19, without parental consent. Allowing prevention of the disease via vaccination is just as important as allowing a minor to be tested for that disease or to be treated for it.”

LifeSiteNews reached out to Executive Director, Michael Ramey of ParentalRights.org, a non-profit political action group working to pass legislation that protects families, to comment on the issue of consent.

“The U.S. Supreme Court recognized decades ago that most children, even in adolescence, are not yet ready to make the kind of long term, potentially life-altering decisions often involved in their medical care,” he said. “The Court rightly declared that it is the proper role of parents to make those judgments. Yet today, we are seeing a flood of orders like this one that ignore this vital parental role. Claiming to give a child ‘freedom’ to make their own decision, all they really do is rob the child of the protection that fit, loving, older and wiser parents can give them from a wrong decision. Such orders put children’s lives at risk, and should be discarded for the unconstitutional rubbish that they are.”

“It isn’t ‘freedom’ if the only time the law empowers a minor to defy her parents is when she’s making the decision the government wants her to make in the first place,” Ramey continued. “That's not freedom: it’s coercion of a minor who has been stripped of her defenses.”


Children and vaccines

The coronavirus is no grave threat for children and teenagers.

America’s Frontline Doctors issued a white paper indicating that the survival rate of children under 19 years that have contracted the coronavirus is 99.997%. There are known complications with the vaccines, the white paper declares, including the immune enhancement whereby “antiCOVID antibodies, stimulated by a vaccine, amplify the infection rather than prevent its damage.” Other possible side effects, as listed by the FDA, include death, heart attacks, stroke, and blood disorders.

Dr. Paul Alexander, a physician writing for the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) explains that there are almost no instances of asymptomatic spread of the virus. Further, he is arguing that children do not need to be vaccinated, and that herd immunity can happen through day-to-day contact in schools. Alexander told Laura Ingraham on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” that “[t]he risk to children is so small, there is no reason to put our children in harm’s way at this point. Not with these untested vaccines. This is reckless.”

Alexander said, “Ludvigsson published a seminal paper in the New England Journal of Medicine on COVID-19 among children 1 to 16 years of age and their teachers in Sweden. From the nearly 2 million children that were followed in school in Sweden, it was reported that with no mask mandates, there were zero deaths from COVID and a few instances of transmission and minimal hospitalization.”

There is hesitancy to vaccinate children due to “lack of confidence in the vaccine” according to the WHO.

Emergency Use Authorization for vaccines
The FDA has issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for three coronavirus vaccines. An EUA can only granted to a medication or vaccine if there are no alternative treatments available, but it doesn’t amount to an actual approval of that medication of vaccine, with proper testing before.

On May 10, 2021, the FDA officially extended the EUA to include children aged 12 to 15 for the Pfizer vaccine. The Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines have still not been given an EUA for adolescents.

The Order, the San Francisco Department of Health claims, is both reasonable and necessary because it is “issued based on evidence of continued community transmission of COVID-19 within the City, throughout the Bay Area, across California, and across the United States; evidence that most COVID-19 infections are caused by people who have no symptoms at all of illness.”

The health risks, the department argues, are serious enough to warrant such an order.

“[T]he age, condition, and health of a significant portion of the population of the City places it at risk for serious health complications, including death, from COVID-19; further evidence that others, including younger and otherwise healthy people, are also at risk for serious outcomes including death; evidence that breakthrough infections can occur in fully vaccinated people; and the reality that SARS-CoV-2 infections and COVID-19 diagnoses remain prevalent throughout the world.”