On Thursday, the Public Health Agency of Sweden announced via a press release that the medical benefit for kids aged five to 11 who have received a COVID vaccine "is currently small" and that they do not recommend inoculation for that age group.
They added that while they are "constantly" assessing the situation, they refuse to recommend general COVID vaccination for children 11 years old and below for the spring term of 2022.
"With the knowledge we have today, with a low risk for serious disease for kids, we don't see any clear benefit with vaccinating them," Health Agency official Britta Bjorkholm explained during a news conference, as reported by Fox News. As per the press release, the agency's director general Karin Tegmark Wisell, an updated guidance will be released before the fall term.
"A general vaccination from the age of 5 is also not expected to have any major effect on the spread of infection at present, neither in the group of children aged 5-11 nor among other groups in the population," the press release stated.
The Swedish government had recommended COVID vaccines for the youth aged 12 and older since October 2021 and recommended high-risk children aged five to 11 to be inoculated. But after analyzing data and discovering that the benefits did not outweigh the risk, health authorities decided otherwise.
Not the Bee pointed out how the mRNA-based COVID vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna were found to more likely cause myocarditis among men. The report accused the American government of "[using] propaganda to push baseless fear of COVID in children in contravention to science." Tesla's Elon Musk even took to Twitter to share "I am in awe of Sweden," replying to the story posted by Disclose.tv.
In the U.S., COVID vaccine uptake is slow among the youth. According to Newsweek, only 17% of kids aged five to 11 are fully vaccinated against COVID two months after health authorities approved the jab for this age group. In Canada, a similar trend can be observed with just 2% of kids aged five to 11 being fully vaccinated against COVID despite having the Pfizer vaccine approved for the age group in November.
Dr. Robert Murphy, executive director for the Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, condemned parents who expressed concern over pediatric COVID vaccines and are hesitant to get their kids vaccinated, PBS Newshour reported. He argued that the low vaccination rates among children was "very disturbing" and that parents are "taking an enormous risk and continuing to fuel the pandemic" despite studies showing that kids can better fight off the virus.
Dr. Jesse Hackell in Pomona, New York shared that parents remain hesitant to vaccinate their children. The pediatrician shared that when asking parents why they have not vaccinated their children yet, they say, "We're not going to be the first million. We'll wait to see what happens."
